Sorry, trying this again....

https://plus.google.com/photos/113903425666285644006/albums/5998207228390260353?authkey=CI_NubeX_eihowE

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Finally!

Canokie, I have been watching this post with interest, because I have a problem much like yours, but looks worse. I had this problem last year also, so I will toss out some ideas that I think may be making my plants look bad.

The problem is on the Early Girl plants only. My other plants have had the same soil and feeding. You can see the other plants in the back ground and they look healthy. All of these plants were purchased, the Early Girl plants soon out grew the grow lights very fast. This has been a bad place to harden plants off because the weather has just been crazy. My little make-shift shelter gets hot enough to bake bread in, andque it I don't have them in some kind of shelter the wind will blow them away.

I wish I could answer you question, but I cant even answer my own question.

Larry

Hi Larry,

Thank you for your response. At least I'm not alone ha ha. I'm hoping its nothing too serious... Maybe just a sign of stress? I've been having a heck of a time trying to harden off my tomato plants with this seesawing weather we've been having, not to mention the gusty winds. Pretty sure my tomatoes have been stressed. Well, I hope they all pull through, whatever it is.

If anybody else has any ideas, please let us know.

As serious a tomato grower as I am (and y'all know how obsessed I am with tomatoes), I don't even pay that much attention to the appearance of tomato plant foliage at this time of the year. No matter what it looks like on any given day, the plants will survive whatever weather condition is displeasing them at the moment and will look better next week or next month.

More than likely, the foliage of the plants is telling both of you some combination of the above: I am immature, I am hungry, I am thirsty, I am cold, I want full-day sun. I want warmer temperatures at night. Guess what? If y'all keep on doing what you're doing and just keep them growing until the weather stabilizes, I think they'll be fine. The kind of discolored foliage you're concerned about is not that unusual this early in spring when the weather is not quite as warm and as sunny as the tomato plants want.

Shelley, There's a slim chance that the lighter yellowish-green patches on your leaves could be the earliest sign of one of the kinds of powdery mildew that affect tomatoes. Sometimes I'll see something like that start up on my plants in May, which tends to be the month my plants have the highest exposure to high humidity/plentiful moisture (if it is raining in May). Be sure you're not getting water on your plant foliage when you water.

The faint lighter mottling on your plants does sort of resemble what those yellow blotches look like in their earliest stage of development...but that doesn't mean your plants have PM. I still think it is just an environmental thing because, honestly, unless your plants are in a building that is roasting hot during the day, your part of OK should still be too cold for these forms of PM to be developing right now.
Larry, I have several dozen varieties of tomato plants out in the greenhouse and most of them look pretty much the same. However, in each flat there is at least one variety that just doesn't look quite as good as the other plants in that flat. They all have been raised together and treated exactly the same, so I am inclined to think it is just the genetics of that particular variety.

For what it is worth, when I put the 20 purchased plants in the ground, the Early Girls were the only ones that looked unhappy. After a couple of weeks in the ground, the Early Girls are starting to look better. Their color is a lot better, but still not exactly the same as the other varieties that never did look unhappy. Still, I bet a month from now the EGs will look virtually the same as all the others. That's been my experience in most years---no matter which plant looks strongest or which one looks weakest, once they've been in the ground a few weeks, that all get to that magical point where the weather is giving them everything they need and they look great.

Also, y'all, check the undersides of your leaves and make sure there's not some little pest feeding on the plants. Sometimes the first clue that you have mites or aphids is that the leaf color is not quite what it ought to be.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Powdery Mildew on Tomato Foliage

Thank you so much for the response, Dawn! I feel better now. The weather this spring has been pretty erratic so its not hard to understand how the tomato plants could be less than happy with their growing conditions right now.

To me it looks like nutrient deficiency, perhaps nitrogen deficiency. I get this during my seedling phase if I dont feed my plants well enough. I see veins of green with yellow leaves and the plants are young, I doubt it is a disease of some sorts, looks like nitrogen to me. You can foliar feed and tomatos usually respond quickly to this but as Dawn said, when you get them in the garden, they should recover just fine.

Also, agreeing with Dawn, my early girls always look the worst during seedling phase.

I do not think it is PM.

Thats my .02 anyways. :)

HarvestTime, I think it could be nitrogen deficiency too, but want to add the following for Shelley and Larry, because I am sure you already know it as well as I do.

Shelley and Larry, When we talk about plants looking like they might have a nitrogen deficiency, that doesn't necessary mean there isn't any nitrogen available to them, so if you've fed them recently, don't rush to feed them again. Sometimes the temperatures are too low and the plants cannot take up the nitrogen even though it is there. March temperatures were all over the place, and the color of my plants changed with the temperatures. After 2 or 3 uncomfortably cool nights and relentlessly cloudy skies, the color faded a little and they looked a little unhappy. Then, after a couple of lovely sunny days and nice, warm nights, they were all beautiful and happy again. I was starting to feel like my plants were bipolar.

I only mentioned the PM because most people recognize it only by the white stuff, when the yellow mottling which tends to appear earlier is a good clue to watch for once the RH and temperatures are at the right levels.

Now that we've had quite a few days in the 80s here, I'm watching for signs of PM, but so far we haven't had enough moisture or high humidity for it to develop yet. In 2012 it popped up early (we were hot early and it was a nice, rainy spring) and I kind of ignored it early on and then had to work harder to stop it in its tracks. A friend had just stopped by and seen the garden looking like absolute perfection and told me my tomato plants that year were the most beautiful he'd ever seen. Both the plants and I were proudly beaming. About a day later the yellow blotching of that form of PM started up---it was as if we had put a curse on the plants by talking about how pretty and healthy they were!

I have to add this about Early Girls. For me, they almost never are the first plant to produce ripe fruit, even if the DTM would lead a person to expect it. I call them (jokingly) Late Girls. This has been an ongoing issue since the early 2000s. I can put a dozen varieties in the ground with EGs having the shortest DTM and 2 or 3 other varieties will produce ripe tomatoes first. However, my Late Girls still will be producing like gangbusters in the August heat when other varieties have wimped out and shut down in the heat, so I don't mind that they seem to be slow starters in my garden every spring no matter what. One of these days they will produce the first ripe tomato of the year, but this year it is looking like Better Bush or Black Cherry will beat them to it. Some years Red Beefsteak even produces a ripe tomato before they do, which defies logic. So many things about gardening defy logic, though.

Dawn