Sick plants

[Seth225]

Ive done pretty well this year with my tomatos with Marshas help. I have had more tomatos than I know what to do with at times, and I am very pleased with the overall results.

There have however been a couple instances of sick plants despite my best efforts. I have attacked a couple photos and I was wondering if anyone could identify for sure what ails these poor guys.

As you can see on one plant the leaves turn a sickly yellow, then brown and die. That variety is cherokee purple I believe

The other plant is/was girl girls weird thing and the leaves just dry out, shrivel, turn black and die.

I hope photos uploaded successfully.

[Seth225]

I forgot to mention that I do spray every sunday with liquid copper and thurcide.

[maxjohnson]

Those plants looks pretty bad and I would have yanked them long before and throw it in the trash and not compost the diseased leaves. To me it looks like a type of fungal wilt, maybe fusarium wilt.

People do use copper and Daconil as prevention sprays to avoid fungal disease. Personally I grow organic and avoid them. I am more OCD with my plants however, so I actively remove any diseased, yellow or spotted looking leaves so diseases have less chance to spread. If a plant is looking bad and not likely to produce well I rather yank them than to sustain an unhealthy plant.

[Seth225]

Thank you.

The plants were yanked. Photos take before the yanking.

They were not particularly wet save the morning dew. We have had very little rain.

[decherdt]

I would have to do some forensics to hazard a proper guess. Checking the back of leaves with a 30x pocket microscope looking for mites to begin and if they are a far gone as they seem, cut the stems and checking the interiors and pulling the roots checking for galls or deformities. And it could still just be a bad dose of Botrytis gray mold and /or Early Blight, etc. At 60 days outside, the heat sets in and those give me manageable trouble no matter what. If these are in containers it makes it harder to blame soil fungus

[AlittleSalt]

That looks like RKN damage to me. It happened in our gardens in 2016.

[Seth225]

Yup they are in earthboxes.

Whats RKN?

Should I be adding anything to the spray mix besides copper and thurcide?

[AlittleSalt]

Root Knot Nematodes - little microscopic beasts that are in the soil. They attack the root system. They can splash up into containers.

I had plants that looked like the ones in your pictures. Healthy one day, and then just plain awful within a week or so.

Marsha knows about RKN. She is the person who told me about my tomato plants having it. There is a thread here that I started about RKN, and many others have made threads about it as well.

[maxjohnson]

No, I don't believe RKN can (directly) cause that kind of damage, they live in the roots, of course hey can weaken the immunity of the plants allowing them to get diseases easier. I know because I've been growing in RKN soil for a couple years and still get good production from certain variety. Since you are growing in Earthboxes, most likely you used potting mix and didn't take soil from the ground and put it into the containers, so RKN is not the issue.

I'm sticking with some form of wilt.

Here's is a good descriptive list of tomato diseases. http://plantdiseasehandbook.tamu.edu...-crops/tomato/

[b54red]

It looks like fusarium wilt to me but being in containers makes that less likely unless it got in somehow. I have had fusarium get in containers back when I used some to see if I could get better results than in my garden. It could also be spider mites. I don't think it is gray mold but gray mold does attack black tomatoes fairly regularly down here in the south and those plants are in such an advanced state of sickness that it is really hard to tell what the culprit is.

How did the disease start? How did the first leaves showing problems look? It would have been great to have seen some pics earlier before the complete wilting of the plants to better gauge what was going on.

Bill