Larry, I can't see the skeletons. Do you mean the skins of insects which have moulted?

George

George, they do look like skins of something very small, maybe like a white fly, or smaller. I have found them on all my plants. I don't see as well as I did when I was younger, but to me they look like small bits of paper ash. You can see small specks on, or near the stem of the tomato on the left.

It may not make a lot of difference because I have already burned the plant. I expect I have more than one issue and will just have to struggle through this year and hope for a better one next year. Thanks for your effort.

Larry

Larry, The white likely is skin/exoskeleton shed by something like aphids, or it could be psyllids.

I don't know what is causing the brown discoloration on the stems of your tomato plants. I've seen it before, but not often, and I don't know that I ever knew why it occurred. The plant didn't die though.

Tomato plants are disease magnets, particularly in wet years when they often get hit hard by bacterial and fungal diseases, and also by diseases caused by viruses. I just don't worry about what the plants look like. I ignore their poor appearance and just harvest and eat the fruit. I am growing them, after all, for the fruit, not for the appearance of the foliage or flowers. I almost never have any sort of serious disease here....usually what I see is Early Blight. If we have a rainy spring, I might see bacterial spot or bacterial speck. If the summer is rainy, I might see a little Septoria Leaf Spot. I don't see much of anything else identifiable. As bad as I think that tomato foliage looks when the plants have the diseases referenced above, I almost never see the diseases actually hit the fruit. Thus, I don't yank and remove plants because the diseases I see here are air borne and soil borne and we're always going to have them around anyway, so why sacrifice a plant? I suppose I would remove a plant if it had Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus, and if I ever saw Late Blight, you can bet I'd remove every affected plant pronto. Overall, though, I tend to ignore crappy-looking foliage. I can expend a lot of energy and worry, and the diseases won't go away and I'll still get fruit...or I can do nothing, and the diseases won't go away and I'll still get fruit. So, either way, I pick fruit, which is what matters to me. : ) Even plants that look nearly dead often produce good usable fruit, so I leave the plants alone as long as they are producing fruit. If they stop producing, I do tend to yank them, but that's because I have a lot of tomato plants and get too much fruit any how.

Dawn