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.

Anticipating that those conditions would cause a bad year for fungus diseases and knowing that once they are on the plant it is too late to do much, I started my fungicide programs from plant out time. So far that is paying off well for me here.

We use Daconil in the commercial fields and Soap Shield and SouthernAG's Liquid Copper (new to me this year). The Daconil is much more effective imo than either copper-based product as I have a fair amount of Early Blight in the home organic garden. But both have given me good protection so far.

Dave

The problem for me has been that it rains multiple days to a week at a time. Then it seems like a waste to spray because it will just be washed off the next day, but in the meantime the rain is just feeding the fungus. I've been waiting out the rain and then just spraying aggressively when the weather clears up. I also have a fan out on the balcony running to increase air circulation. It seems to help.