HELP!!! Are my plants doomed?!? (pics)

[lapk78]

I've sprayed with Daconil. I've sprayed with diluted bleach. I had been adding Cal-Mag to the water for a while to help with some BER. I just recently watered with the calcium nitrate "snack" to encourage new growth. But every day there are lots of newly dead leaves and/or branches to remove. Originally, the death was occurring low on the plants, but recently it has been slowly moving up. Even some of the main stems are wilting.

To add insult to injury, Between my six plants (all in EarthTainers), I currently have over 90 green tomatoes growing (and looking good) hanging from the plants. What to do with these if the plants totally die?

Is my ailment Septoria, Fusarium, TSW, Grey Mold, Early or late Blight? All of the above? I'm pretty sure there's some mold, but the bleach spray hasn't seemed to help.

Some leaves just turn yellow. Some leaves develop "soggy-looking" tips, then eventually shrivel and dry up into a crispy dead leaves. Some leaves develop yellow spots, then die. Some leaves are freckled with tiny dark spots... then die. Even some stems main stems have spots on them. My plants are now "naked" nearly half way up. What the heck is killing my toms?

Here are some pics I took just now after pruning. The pile of dead leaves is just from today's pruning.

HELP??

-Lyle

[rnewste]

Lyle,

In your picture #5 in about the 7 o'clock position I see an insect of some type. Do you see it too? If so, have you been spraying with any Insecticide?

Raybo

[lapk78]

Originally Posted by rnewste

Lyle,

In your picture #5 in about the 7 o'clock position I see an insect of some type. Do you see it too? If so, have you been spraying with any Insecticide?

Raybo

Hmmm... I hadn't noticed any insects before (other than some small caterpillars a few weeks ago which I took care of with BT). I went back to the leaf in question to see if what you are seeing is just part of the leaf, but that shape isn't on it now. I guess it is an insect. It's silhouette looks like it may be a baby lacewing. Many weeks ago I sprayed with neem oil added to some insecticidal soap to treat what I think was thrips, but no other insecticides since then. I can't see any other insects on my plants now. I assumed that it would be obvious if I had an insect problem. What are you thinking?

-Lyle

[b54red]

Lyle picture number 2 looks like it could be Gray Mold but the stem picture with the lesions means it could possibly be Late Blight. The bleach spray I recommended will help with Gray Mold if it hasn't gotten too far along in destroying the plant. I had GM on over 20 tomatoes and I was a bit late starting the treatment but still only lost 2 plants to GM. I had to spray them twice in about a weeks time.

[lapk78]

Ray,

I haven't really seen many insects on my plants. However, many weeks ago I did see a thrip on a leaf that I had pruned away.

Is there an insecticide that you recommend? Should I spray it as a preventative, or wait until I see some bad guys?

Also, if my plants totally die in the near future, do you think it possible to buy some new ones from my local nursery and hope for a fall crop? If so, will I need to do anything to my EarthTainers, such as sterilization? Should I "inoculate" any new plants? How? With what?

Thanks!

-Lyle

[Kazfam]

Do any of these pics help: http://customers.hbci.com/~wenonah/min-def/tomatoes.htm

[lapk78]

Originally Posted by b54red

Lyle picture number 2 looks like it could be Gray Mold but the stem picture with the lesions means it could possibly be Late Blight. The bleach spray I recommended will help with Gray Mold if it hasn't gotten too far along in destroying the plant. I had GM on over 20 tomatoes and I was a bit late starting the treatment but still only lost 2 plants to GM. I had to spray them twice in about a weeks time.

b54red,

Thanks for the reply. I sprayed the plants on two consecutive evenings with the bleach dilution. On the second night, and after two hours had passed from my bleaching, I sprayed with Daconil. I don't see what else I can do to treat the Grey Mold. My 9 ft tall plants are naked nearly halfway up.

If there is Late Blight, is there anything I can do to treat it? Thanks.

-Lyle

[lapk78]

Originally Posted by Kazfam

Do any of these pics help: http://customers.hbci.com/~wenonah/min-def/tomatoes.htm

Kazfam,

Thanks for the link. I looked through the different pics of mineral deficiencies, but none really seemed to look like my ailments (maybe a Manganese deficiency???). I have a feeling that my ailment is a combination of runaway Grey Mold with Late Blight. Any suggestions on how to treat Late Blight? Thanks!

-Lyle

[Dewayne mater]

At least a couple of pictures show what looks like Gray Mold. Bill's bleach spray does seem to knock that back and the leaf kill ends up being much more than what was obviously affected by mold. If you've had more rain and humidity in San Antonio, you might consider hitting it one more time with bleach.

I think you have something else working as well, ubt I'm not sure if it is late blight or some other blight/infection. Check out this page on late blight, which among other things says that if your plant has more than 5%-10% of leaves infected, you probably can't win the war.

http://vegetablemdonline.ppath.corne...to_LateBlt.htm

Good luck. Hoping it is not late blight, but the purple stems have me concerned.

Dewayne mater

[lapk78]

Thanks Dewayne,

Now, I'm not sure it's Late Blight after all. The spots don't have the distinct yellow halo that I've seen in so many pics online. Also, none of the fruit is affected.

Early in the season I was afraid that my plants had TSWV. I was seeing small brown freckling on the leaves which led me to fear TSWV. But, again, all my fruit looks just fine. TSWV would make the toms look tye-dyed, and Late Blight would rot the fruit, right? Maybe it's just Grey Mold. But bleach and Daconil isn't helping. Plus, some branches are going limp and appear "bruised".

New flowers are still appearing and fruiting really high up (9 ft) on the plants. Meanwhile, the "death" is still working its way up the plants.

-Lyle

[z_willus_d]

Lyle, I'm sorry to hear about your tomato woes. I know misery doesn't always love company, but I will at least e-commensurate with you for a moment. First let me say that your description of the problems you're having and the pictures you've taken are an almost perfect match for the problems I've been having in my main beds. I might have written the exact same post yesterday.

A bit over a week or two ago, I started noticed some yellowing of leaves on my older main-bed plants. These plants had all been doing amazingly for some time. At that point, I would have said this was the best my tomato garden has every looked after 1.5-2 months into the fun. I left the yellow leaves I saw for a day or two, but then there were more so I cut those and the original off. Then I spent the weekend mulching the beds with Fir wood bark. I had to cut off a large number of otherwise healthy looking (though a bit rough on the edges) branches to make room for 4-6" of bark in the beds. A day later we started hitting higher temperatures and these past couple days have been close to 100 and over a few times. Yesterday, I took off a pile of leaves and branches that looked roughly the same size as the one you posted. Now I have a few more plants than you, but it's still painful. I'd say I took out 15-35% of the foliage on about 30% of my plants. After removing the branches, I sprayed with Daconil. This morning, I watered (my once a week deluge), and I thought I'd better hit the plants with another dose of Daconil since some of the lower leaves got wet. This I did, but I had to cull out another pile of branches/leaves about the same as the night before.

I've examined my leaves under multiple magnification loupe, and I found no sign of mites, although I did find some aphid corpses. I've been spraying organic insecticides (take-down, Spinosad, and now AzaMax). It's been hot and dry with lowish humidity. I'm really at a loss as to what's afflicted the plants. I will say mine don't have so much of the gray mold looking stuff as I see in your 2nd pic. I think I see that after the leaves die (the older ones I miss).

Anyway, here's wishing you and I both some better luck or skill. We need our harvest and some payment for all this work, right. Please let us know what becomes of your tomatoes and if you are able to identify the source of their problem(s).

Thanks,
Naysen

Edit: I added a couple pics of a few branches that I skipped over. These represent the least advanced stage of this problem. I'd say most I pulled were far more yellow and sickly.

I'm thinking this could be related to a Nitrogen deficiency. This past week and a half, I've been running my in-ground irrigation, so no longer adding fertilizer with my watering (had been using BioBizz BioGrow and FoxFarm's TigerBloom). The other possibility could be some kind of over-watering in the sense I'm doing one long soak and maybe with my mulch things aren't sufficiently drying. I doubt this possibility though, as I have very well draining grow media. I think I'll add some water-soluble high N fertilizer and see what happens.
-naysen

[b54red]

Originally Posted by lapk78

Thanks Dewayne,

Now, I'm not sure it's Late Blight after all. The spots don't have the distinct yellow halo that I've seen in so many pics online. Also, none of the fruit is affected.

Early in the season I was afraid that my plants had TSWV. I was seeing small brown freckling on the leaves which led me to fear TSWV. But, again, all my fruit looks just fine. TSWV would make the toms look tye-dyed, and Late Blight would rot the fruit, right? Maybe it's just Grey Mold. But bleach and Daconil isn't helping. Plus, some branches are going limp and appear "bruised".

New flowers are still appearing and fruiting really high up (9 ft) on the plants. Meanwhile, the "death" is still working its way up the plants.

-Lyle

Lyle if you have Gray Mold the bleach spray will kill any leaves affected by it; but if you have Late Blight and it is already leaving lesions on your plant stems then the bleach will do no good except help prevent its spread by killing some of the spores. Gray Mold and Late Blight can look very similar and the plant stems will eventually wilt in a similar way but Late Blight is a much faster killer.

Did you spray the whole plant from top to bottom or just the affected area? I can tell you from experience that Gray Mold will be on many more leaves than you can see and when you spray some leaves quite a ways from where you thought the disease was will also shrivel up and die. The only times I have had the bleach spray not work on Gray Mold was when I waited far too long to begin using it and then I just ended up with a dead plant.

I saw no leaves that looked like TSWV; but if you did have it on large healthy plants then they could stay alive with it for a fairly long time and still have other diseases at the same time.

[z_willus_d]

Bumping this thread, as I haven't heard back from Lyle on progress with his problems, nor a response to my post.
-n