I had a tomato that I kept watering because it looked wilted. It had a stem borer. My peppers are getting spots on the leaves and losing leaves because of all the rain.

Sheila,

Does it wilt during the heat of the day and then perk up in the evening? Or is it still wilted in the morning?

Also, have you checked to see if the soil is either very wet or very dry? In either case, wilting can occur.

Occasionally I see the kind of wilting that occurs when the weather is just too miserably hot. I had a lot of wilting on plants growing in full sun in 2011 when our high temperatures were between 100-115 for 70 or 80 days, including being over 100 for the whole month of July with no rainfall. I tried to stop the wilting by watering more deeply, by mulching more heavily to keep the soil cooler, and by erecting a shade cloth over the top of the plant. I lost a couple of plants that year, but the others hung in there and survived, though they still sometimes wilted during the day.

The key is that if a pepper plants wilts during the heat of the day but then is not rebounding overnight, it likely is something more than a heat-induced wilt.

Soil infested with root-knot nematodes can harm the root system and vigor of the plants, but since you said the roots looked fine, I assume there weren't any of the galls caused by root-knot nematodes?

Remember, too, that peppers are in the Solanum family so can be affected by all the wilt diseases that affect tomatoes.....southern wilt, bacterial wilt, fusarium wilt, etc. In Oklahoma, the sudden wilting and death of a pepper plant often is caused by phytopthora root rot. If your area has had lots of rainfall and the soil has stayed pretty wet, you might be seeing one or more of those wilt diseases. Peppers also are vulnerable to various viruses, and pepper plants infected with viral diseases often wilt before they die.

When they wilt, is there a pattern at all? Something like the topmost leaves only wilt? Or wilt first followed by subsequent wilting of more leaves? The whole plant wilts all at once? Only one side of it wilts? Do the pepper plants look fine before the wilt occurs or have you been seeing spotting or something else on the leaves?

It has been very hot here and not all that rainy, so I've put up shadecloth over my hot peppers, and I planned ahead with the sweet peppers and planted them where they would get shade from other nearby plants as the summer went on. I know that pepper plants are, technically, full sun plants, but have found I get a lot less wilting with them in periods of extreme heat if they are exposed to only 6 or 8 hours of direct sun. It seems like, in our climate, I'll see a lot of wilting if they are getting full sun all day long from sunrise to sunset in mid-July through mid-August when our temperatures are at their peak.

Remember, too, that pepper plants are fairly shallow-rooted, so it is essential to mulch them with several inches of mulch so that the sunlight hitting the soil doesn't cook their roots.

Dawn

it is shaded some. has a tree to the east and tall tomatoes to the west. It is not rebounding at night at all. It is pretty much a goner today. Havent pulled it up to look at roots. Just knew there were some there so it wasnt a gopher. guess ill pull it up and see whats underneath the ground

Well pulled it up. Didn't see anything strange with the roots. Didn't see where anything had bored in the stem. Just looked OK 1 day and not the next. So far all the rest look ok.Trying to remember if it was an atris that died a few weeks ago. It may be weaker. We shall see.

Now I have a tomato doing the same thing. Just hope it doesn't go through all of them I still have lots of green tomatoes.

Sheila,

Uh oh.

Now that it has happened to two different pepper plants, and to a tomato plant, I'd be more concerned it might be bacterial wilt.

It can be really hard to distinguish regular wilting from the kind of wilting that accompanies bacterial wilt. Usually, if a tomato or pepper plant wilts because heat is causing it to transpire water out via its leaves faster than the roots can take up replacement moisture, the plants recover promptly once the sun starts setting and the air temps begin to cool off. With bacterial wilt, you'll often get the sudden, permanent wilt, but sometimes you get wilt for several days with recovery at night, but each day it recovers less well than the day before and then, bam!, one day it doesn't recover from the wilting and is dead. The disease kills the plants so fast that they go from green to dead without first turning brown or yellow.

One test for bacterial wilt is to cut off a limb (from the wilted portion of the plant if the whole plant isn't wilting) and stick the cut end into a glass of water or a clear vase of water. Watch carefully to see if a milky-colored exudate oozes out of the cut stem into the water. If you see that, then that plant has bacterial wilt. Because bacterial wilt can spread from plant to plant, once you have determined a plant has bacterial wilt, it is important to promptly remove it from the garden.

I'm hoping you're just seeing regular heat-induced wilting, but based on the two pepper plants and now this tomato plant, it is starting to seem more and more like it might be bacterial wilt.

There is no real treatment or cure for home gardeners to use with bacterial wilt. It is soilborne and you would need to rotate all susceptible types of plants out of that area for 3 to 4 additional years. If there is no way that you can rotate, your best bet is to remove and discard the soil in the immediate root zone of each dead plant since it is logical to assume the bacteria is there in that soil, and then to solarize the rest of the soil for several months in the hope that the high temperatures will kill off any bacteria residing in your garden soil.

I'm going to link some info on bacterial wilt. The info at this particular website has great photos that can help with diagnosis.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Bacterial Wilt of Tomatoes

i cut the tomato plant this morn and stuck it in water. saw no white anything. So maybe I have been fortunate and it is something else. Got rid of the plant and its nice green tomatoes. It wilted and just lost color. didnt even really turn brown for a few days so it kind of sounds like it. Guess I will find out the hard way. Thats usually how I learn most of my lessons anyway!!

Have you had a lot of rain? Sometimes roots that are too wet become clogged with water and the plants wilt. I had that happen long-term in 2007 when we had massive amounts of rain in May, June, and July. I remember that our June rainfall was at least a foot on top of May rainfall that was above average. Otherwise, it is hard to guess what is causing it if it isn't a wilt disease.

When you cut a stem of a wilted plant, sometimes you see brown inside the stems. The brown is a symptom of a vascular wilt like fusarium wilt.

You've already tried the cut stem in water test for bacterial wilt.

Another possibility is that you're seeing the wilt that comes from juglone poisoning from black walnut trees. If you have black walnut trees whose foliage drip line is near the garden, it could be the juglone. Or, if you've used mulch or compost that contains black walnut leaves.

You can get that sort of wilting when something is tunneling through the soil (moles, gophers, voles, etc.) and either disturbing the roots or, in the case of gophers and voles, eating the roots. I've had a vole or voles in the new back garden eating their way through it all summer now. About twice a week, a plant suddenly wilts, and when I go to check on it, there's no (or very little) root system left because they've eaten it. Something is making those plants wilt and die. When they go from green to wilted to dead it usually is bacterial wilt. We have to assume it is something else, though, if you don't get the milky white slime in the water when you test a branch. I just don't know what else it would be.

You can get wilt if you have stem borers, which Helen already mentioned.

Beyond the above, some wilting is normally during August heat because plants can transpire more moisture than they're taking in, leaving them temporarily short of moisture internally. When that's the issue, though, as the sun sets and they cool down, their transpiration level drops and the leaves perk up.

Beyond the above, I am out of ideas.