Bacterial speck, septoria or something else?

[alpeldunas]

Thank you all so much for the advice. I'll take some pictures of the "sick" plant tomorrow. It definitely doesn't look as healthy as the others and the discolored leaves seem to be rolling up quite severely now. Still, as you all have mentioned, I'm not going to make any decisions until I'm sure and I suspect I'm just going to wind up leaving it. I get back from vacation on the 20th and after a week away not scrutinizing my plants every hour, I should have a better perspective on how things look. Hopefully, my friend who is caring for my plants while I'm away will be willing to spray a couple times while I'm gone if the rain continues. Enough already with the rain!

Thanks again all! I bought some yellow sticky traps that I'm going to set out and just try my best to continue with preventative measures.

[livinonfaith]

Do you have fruit on the plant yet? I had TSWV two years ago. Honestly, I am awful at diagnosing this stuff, as so many of them seem to look similar to me.

But with the TSWV, you get this really unique weird pattern on the fruit, with rings that remind me of a psychedelic lava lamp. I hated the disease, but there was one fruit that was so beautiful that it was almost worth losing a plant to have seen it.

Here are some links to some photos.

http://www.science.oregonstate.edu/b...omato_tswv.htm

http://vegetablemdonline.ppath.corne...SpWiltFS13.htm

[kevn357]

Do you have any purple spots on your stems and blossoms?

[alpeldunas]

There are only two very small, green tomatoes in that plant right now ...about the size of a marble, maybe a tad bigger. I looked and did not see any of the telltale rings thus far.

If my memory serves me correctly (and I will check again in the AM when it's light), there is some purplish streaking and some specks in places on the stems and also on the green part of the blossoms (that is over the yellow blossoms). I don't remember seeing black/purple specks on the blossoms, but I do think I remember some of them looking a little brown on the edges.

I'll double check on that and take some pics tomorrow to post. Even if it is TSWV, maybe the photos will help someone else.

[Redbaron]

Originally Posted by alpeldunas

Redbaron,

Can I ask what the variables or reasons are behind you not pulling your own plants but recommending others do? I am curious to what the thought process is.



Anyway, thanks for the feedback and anything else you may have to offer.

Because there is a difference between in the garden and for production. I am running a trial that has a potential to be expanded commercial scale. If you are growing 100 acres of tomatoes, you don't get to "baby" each plant like in a garden. So even though my trial is small enough to baby every plant, I don't. I pretend it is just another plant in a 100 acre field. I see a yellow leaf? I simply let it be yellow. A few specks here and there? So be it.

Now what I will do is watch it and take notes to see what happens. See if the organic methods that mimic nature have a built in solution. Surprisingly in most cases Nature does have a solution, if you are patient enough to wait for it. This is of course just the opposite of conventional advise however. So I generally let the experts on disease give their advise.

Helen Atthowe from biodesign farms grows mostly tomatoes and peppers. She has found that because she uses a specific way of growing crops, diseases that would devastate a crop are generally harmless. My project is modeled quite closely to hers in many ways. Living mulch parts 1 and 2 In the vid she explains it with a close up of a diseased pepper plant.

And here is some relatively new research on how plants can potentially fight off disease. Fighting microbes with microbes And I have inoculated my plants with beneficials, plus use methods that try and nurture wild beneficials.

But keep in mind, while there may be more than one way to fight disease microbes, you do have to fight them somehow. You can't just let disease have free reign. If you did that, you would be a poor steward of the land who was potentially harming your neighbors crops. So if you are not using the strange way of growing that I use (partly copied from Helen), or some other proven way to fight the disease, then you should fight disease in the manner conventional experts recommend, or simply pull the plant and burn it.

That's just my opinion. Opinions do vary, and my opinion is more likely the minority opinion. I hope that explains my thinking on the issue though.

[alpeldunas]

Scott,

Thank you for the reply. That is very interesting and certainly something I'm intrigued to read up upon for next year. I think someone mentioned in the long TSWV thread that it's interesting we stress so much about keeping what used to be a weed happy.

So, upon inspection this morning, every tomato I am growing is affected with purple specks on their leaves, including seedlings from root cuttings I started that do not even have buds yet. I guess they all banned together and decided to spare me from having to decide whether or not to pull the first afflicted plant. It is amazing to me how quickly the others went from having no obvious, visible symptoms (and I scrutinized them all yesterday) to have quite noticeable speckles. One of the newly afflicted also has what looks like a purple splotch on the stem. I know I've read it takes 10-14 days for symptoms to show, it's just surprising to me it would go from one obviously affected and just a sprinkling of speckles on nearest leaves of the two neighboring plants to every plant, even the ones against a different wall of the house, have quite clear symptoms.

I'm still not convinced it's TSWV. I just didn't find that many thrips, but maybe there were lots more present 10-14 days ago when I wasn't looking for them and they were able to spread the virus then. I looked at the fruit and found three that could look marbled if I look hard enough and imagine that's what I'm looking at. I'll try to take some more pictures, if nothing else but for future information, but today is pretty busy getting ready to leave tomorrow and I want to try to do a bleach spray today and copper tomorrow before we hit the road.

[NarnianGarden]

I am having some weird color changes in my beloved plants as well. Black specks and dots that are taking over whole leaves.. that might mean fungi or bacterial disease, or most likely, nutrients deficiency - we have had crazy weather conditions this year, from extreme heat to the current coldness. Pictures from the disease diagnosing sites haven't given any definite answer.

They did the same in the beginning of June and changed into purple discoloration, but recovered and turned back to dark green. Now they are full of dark purple / black spots again... Otherwise very strong and vigorous, pushing new fruits and flowers.

The pepper plant nearby is not affected and is happy as a lark.

Quite baffled, since I have tried all I can to take good care of my container garden...
Will just wait and see and hope that whatever is ailing them, they'll be able to produce fruits till the end of season.