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gjcore

A Sad Day for the Tomatoes :-(

gjcore
12 years ago

I pulled all of the in ground tomatoes today in the backyard. I'm not positive what went wrong. Starting near the end of the rain in July all of the tomatoes in the backyard starting turning yellow, virtually no new growth and no flowering. I've been trimming off the dead stuff for awhile, did a little fertilizing and tried to keep them evenly watered. Some blossom end rot formula seemed to help a bit.

Fortunately I planted way more tomatoes than I needed. The 10 in containers in the backyard mostly look good and the 5 I planted in the front yard look good except one that may not have been watered enough.

I'm guessing that it might have been a soil-borne disease.

All well I guess it gives me room to get more of a fall garden in.

Comments (7)

  • tommysmommy
    12 years ago

    Aw, that's too bad. Hate it when all our hard work doesn't yield results. But the beauty is, there's always next year!

  • digit
    12 years ago

    Greg, I lost all but about 6' of one bed of peas this year. I have no sure idea of what was eating them!

    It looked like grasshopper damage but so early that it couldn't have been grasshoppers. The only bug I'd seen in any number was the flea beetle. There were soon a terrible lot of them eating their "shot-holes" in all sorts of things. But, the peas didn't have shot-holes.

    I cannot remember when I've had any real loss of peas ever. Didn't really learn a thing . . . except, I guess, to continue to rely on as much variety as I can, in the garden.

    Oh yeah, Peter Rabbit ate nearly all of the 1st planting of beans. A perennial problem and only really solved by the natural predators. Maybe one reason why I have usually relied so much on later plantings of green beans.

    We live and learn, as best we can. Good Luck with the tomatoes you have and Next Year!

    Steve

  • david52 Zone 6
    12 years ago

    I had disease problems this year earlier than most years with the big wind storms in late May/early June and had to pull a dozen plants. I replaced them with those 6-pack nursery plants, which are barely producing green tomatoes now. Then had the usual July problems, pulled another dozen plants. Then the heat seemed to slow down the pollination.

    I'll still get a fare amount of tomatoes, but thats because I planted so many. As Steve says, when the tomato plants get pulled out in June/July, I plant pole beans to fill the gap.

  • colokid
    12 years ago

    My tomatoes, that's all I raise, did OK, but seem way late to me. Just now starting to get ripe. BUT! I have like one plant at a time show wilt and over 10 days or so die. Not water or any disease that I can blame. --No spray that I know off any where near, but the only thing I can come up with is a very small dose of weed killer. The first thing I notice is when you look at it from a distance, you see the wilt, first at the top, and then it get worse and worse.

  • david52 Zone 6
    12 years ago

    Kenny, having one plant start to wilt and die sounds a lot like curly top virus, which is what I deal with. Brought to you by be beet leafhopper.

    Here, they seem to blow in from the desert. But I think I have a resident population established.

    Here is a link that might be useful: link

  • colokid
    12 years ago

    Thank you so much David. I think you may have named it. I never heard of curly top before. The other I was thinking of is bacterial wilt. Any way, wilt takes a week or two to kill plant and seems to start at top-or at least not from the bottom. It just wiped out my orange 1 plant in three days tho. Some of them try to recover but don't.
    We have every thing from dry pasture to sugar beets and lots of corn growing here. Wind of course. I will do more research on it.
    I just ate a spudakee (PL Cherokee purple)on brown bread with sandwich spreed--boy was that good.
    97 degrees here right now.

  • kvenkat
    12 years ago

    I am suspecting that one or two of my toms might have septoria leaf spot. Gonna get some spray and see what happens.