I've had 4 pretty successful years of growing tomatoes here in West Tennessee; last year I had a great season where I was giving away 50 pounds of tomatoes at a time for a couple of months. One plant on one day had 13 pounds of ripe tomatoes, not accounting for all the ones that weren't ripe.
This year, even using the same varieties I had last year, everything is taken over with fungus. A few weeks ago it appeared to be small dots in the leaves with eventual yellowing and now it seems to be a horrible, dark scabby affliction and everything just goes black and dies.
We had almost a month of straight rain where we had 7 - 10 inches in the first week or two of June. The plants were all doing fine before that and (I think this might be my problem) I hadn't sprayed any fungicides as a preventive measure when the rain started. Once we got a break in the weather I sprayed them, but I'm thinking it was too late.
I started with removing affected parts of the plants and using Ortho (chlorathalonil) spray, but it didn't have much effect. I have now switched to a copper fungicide hoping that might help where the Ortho stuff didn't and I'm still removing sick parts of the plants, but some plants seem to have little left over after a pruning.
I don't think it's my soil or gardening practices... I haven't really had this sort of trouble until the end of the growing season when all the plants just seem to die at once from the bottom up, so I haven't had the need to spray for fungus. I rotate the spots in the garden for plants each year. I layer grass and leaves all year long in the garden to keep weeds down and make my own soil in the process.
Sorry for the length of the post; it's just upsetting. We wanted to get into canning this year because we had so much abundance last year, but so far this season, we've only had a couple of dozen tomatoes out of 15 plants...
I was just wondering if everyone else around here is having the same problems, and I figured people would ask questions about what I do in the garden, so I put all of that in the opening post.
digdirt2
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