At a loss. Please help!

[meatburner]

At a loss as to what is happening to my celebrity tomatoes. These are in a 5 gal swc with potting mix. Because of the wind and up and down heat, these containers require at least one half gallon of water every day. At first just figured BER but now something else is going on. Not bottom fruit but top fruit as well. PLEASE let me know what you think is going on.

[RayR]

It looks like Gray Wall

[meatburner]

Thanks Ray. That is the closest of what I have been able to find. I am wondering if I put too much fertilizer in the top of the5 gal global bucket and could be the culprit. Don't know what to do at this point. Tks.

[RayR]

Did you cut one open to see what the tissue looks like inside? If the discolored tissue is isolated toward the wall of the fruit then it might be caused by environmental or nutrient problems. If the brown discoloration is coming radially from the center then it may be caused by Tobacco Mosaic Virus, but if it was TMV it would probably show on the leaves too.

[meatburner]

Ray, here is a cross section of one of them. I am not enough of a gardener to know what is happening. Hope you can help. Thanks.

[Wi-sunflower]

I also think it's Grey Wall.

While I've personally never seen it , here is a link that may give you a few tips. Some of his descriptions sound like your conditions http://mdvegetables.umd.edu/files/Mo...m-web%20pg.pdf

It seems somehow connected with low potassium (K) in the fruit even tho there is plenty in the soil. They haven't figured out why the K isn't being taken up tho. While it happens more often in cool cloudy areas, this was seen in a high tunnel with the warmer temps and a high fruit load.

It's possible your high temps if combined with a big fruit load may have something to do with it. I don't know what to tell you as far as what to do tho.

Carol

[RayR]

That's a strange disorder, the brown areas inside the fruit make me think that you can't eliminate the possibility that it might be something bacterial or viral at work. I'm no expert on Gray Wall, but I thought it would be more isolated at the outer wall of the fruit.
I found this good article which shows that Gray Wall symptoms can be caused by bacterial or viral infections. Worth a read.

[carolyn137]

The fact is that the absolute cause of Gray Wall remains unknown.

I just read the description in my Seminis Tomato pathology monograph and it says:

(Environmental factors which APPEAR to be associated with this disorder include high nitrogen, low potassium, high soil moisture, low light intensity and soil compaction. In addtion, certain bacteria, fungi, and/or tomato mosaic virus are THOUGHT to be involved in Gray Wall.) The CAPS are mine.

Summary? No documented proven cause to date.

Seminis is the world's best disease lab, their pictures are featured at TAMU for one and I treasure my copy of their monograph, which used to be for sale, but hasn't been for quite a few years now.

In a way the above reminds me of what I named the CRUD many years ago. Dr. Tom Zitter at Cornell, a well known tomato disease specialist, knew what I was talking about when I called him about it and said they THOUGHT it was due to an aberant Early Blight ( A, solani), but had not been able to isolate the aberrant form from plants that have CRUD. And once CRUD seedlings get planted out and in the sun the CRUD goes away.

So if you can't isolate a suspected pathogen from a diseased plant nor set up experiements to prove that low K and the other factors suggestged to be associated with Gray Wall to prove the point, those kinds of situations remain unsolved.

BER used to be thought due to lack of uptake of Ca++ from the soil, and BER affects many other crops than tomatoes and so b'c of the economic value of the BER situation many funded studies were done which showed that it's not just uptake of Ca++ via the roots, rather, it's due to malabsorption within the plants that are stressed.

If Gray Wall were economically important to large scale growers I bet a lot more money would have been invested in doing more studies, but it isn't, so right now it's thinking this, thinking that with no concrete proof of anything.

[meatburner]

Thanks Ray and Carolyn. I guess I will pull the affected fruit and see what happens from there. A few appear okay at this time and a lot of flowers are present. Not the kind of luck I was hoping for. Oh well. Thanks again.