Disease or pest, which to treat first

[Dewayne mater]

Bill - Green to blush is the single longest wait of all tomato gardening! I wish disease would spread as slow as it takes them to go from green to blush.

Glad to hear you are feeling better (on another post)!

Here are tomatoes I picked over this weekend.

I'm definitely removed a lot of diseased leaves - more than ever and am still doing so. Light rain and near 100% humidity today have me wondering if more funigicide will help...hate the thought of a 3rd bleach treatment in 2.5 weeks. Do you know how many leaves can be removed before the plant stops being able to produce ripe fruit and how many leaves can be lost before taste is affected?

If anybody wonders, from top left - Big beef, solar flare, JD's Special C Tex, a lime for size comparison, black cherry and sun gold. The just blushing is Super Sioux and several Black and Brown Boar - super prolific plant for me every year.

[newgardener_tx]

Nice harvest! Make me want to grow solar flare next year. It is beautiful.

[b54red]

I've had fruit do fine on plants with almost no leaves but sun scald can be a real problem. I've now sprayed my JD's twice with the bleach spray and used Daconil and copper; but I fear I will lose most of the leaves on it before fruit reaches maturity. I hate gray mold, you think you have it beat and back it comes after a nice rain.

Bill

[aclum]

Hi Bill,

Have you (or anyone else reading this) tried Mycostop for your gray mold problems?

http://hydro-gardens.com/other_ipm_c...s.htm#mycostop

The mycostop claims to control a lot of different stuff, including fusarium and damping-off. . Same website also carries Fungastp to "control" botryus.

Anne

[b54red]

I used it one season with no positive results. Like most overpriced organic solutions it just doesn't cut it in our climate. It may have some positive results in places with less disease pressure but so far I have only found one thing that has any good results with Gray Mold and that is the bleach spray and it is only temporary unless low humidity sets in. The bleach spray slows it down and stops it if caught early enough but that is hard to do because the disease is so hard to see at first. By the time you know you have it the disease is usually fairly well developed on the plant and then the best you can do is slow it down by frequent spraying to keep the spores from spreading so fast.

There is supposed to be a fungicide made by Bayer that works very well in preventing Gray Mold but I have been unable to find it except on their website and you can't buy it direct from them. I checked with the local suppliers of farm chemicals and none of them have it and if they did it would probably be in quantities meant for 100 acres or more, not for small users like me.

Bill

[brooksville]

Bill, looks like Bayer released this version of Serenade in October of 2013.

Serenade Optimum (Bacillus subtilis strain QST713 26.2%).

The feed and seed active ingredient % is about 1.37 if I remember correctly.
They also have a one called Sonata. $79.99 for 2.5 gallon jug. Available online here

It is OMRI certified.

John

[brooksville]

Sonata is for Powdery Mildew.

[b54red]

John the fungicide I was talking about was not Serenade. Boy was that stuff a waste of money for me. I bought 4 large containers of it one year and used it regularly and had the worst disease problems I have ever had. I had high hopes for it but they were dashed.

Maybe it wasn't Bayer that had the fungicide it might have been another company. I think it was called Boscalid or something like that. I saw it in a write up by one of the University Ag departments in a discussion of fungicide use on tomatoes. It was the only one they listed that was effective in Gray Mold prevention.

Bill

[Dewayne mater]

Bill or anyone, can I spray daconil and an IGR like Azamax at the same time? Azamax seems to be suspended in oil. I used bleach spray tonight after 4 days or nights of rain in a row. Tomorrow morning I have to get a fungicide in place, but if I could also hit the IGR for spider mites, that'd save me a spraying. Thanks!

Dewayne mater