Shop Products
Houzz Logo Print
dusty_2008

Stunted tomato plants with knobby protusions & discolor on stalks

dusty_2008
15 years ago


After 3 years of incredible tomato gardens (plants 8' to 12' tall toppled my cages the 1st year) I have a serious problem this year. Or perhaps I should say "problems". Spider-mites for one, but I'm dealing with those with a polymer product that I read about here and ordered and it should arrive any day now. But I don't think that is my only or worst problem. Even though the accompanying photo is admittedly poor quality (but the best I can do without borrowing a better camera) it still shows what I am concerned about. To wit: very stunted plants about 12" to 18" tall (and keep in mind they were transplanted 6 weeks ago) with discolorations and knobby protrusions on the stalk.

I have searched the web for 2 weeks now, but can find nothing remotely resembling this. It appears to be a disease, but what? My wife says "pull-em and replant", but if this is a soil-borne problem I fear new transplants may well suffer the same fate. It seems to me to be imperative to determine what this is b4 going any further!

The only things I have done differently this year are:

  1. We burned off a brush pile and I mixed some of the ashes in whenever I prepared the soil for planting.
  2. We have a number of pine trees on our property and I had read (here, I think) that pine needles make an excellent mulch and hey, it's free! That's all the different stuff.

    FWIW, I put the pine needles on top of 4 or 5 layers of newspaper with a soaker hose underneath as has been my method in years past.

    Oh, and another thing - the bottom leaves of some of the plants are turning brown with a lot of small holes in them. My nursery guy says he has seen a lot of spider mites, but has never seen them cause holes in the leaves. And no, we don't have an ant problem.

    So to sum this mess up - I have spider mites, holey, brown leaves & stunted plants that look like something out of a Stephen King movie!

    I suppose that in my heart I knew that the past 3 years had been almost too good to be true, but I was getting a pretty swelled head about my "Super-Garden" nonetheless. Hello reality check...

    Anyway, any help or guidance anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Ray...

Image link:

Comments (9)

  • dyannel
    15 years ago

    I am having the same problem with my tomatoes, holes in the leaves, brown spots, and knobby stalks and I wondered if someone answered Rays problem above. I need help. I am not having success at all this year.

  • allisoncollins
    13 years ago

    I am having the same problem with mine. The stalk is wart like but the leaves are great and the plant is still producing fruit. Have you sprayed them with anything to prevent it? My neighbor is a great gardener and she has never seen anything like it.

  • torquill
    13 years ago

    Spider mites can't cause holes in the leaves, though they can cause discoloration and stunting... I'm guessing they aren't that severe yet, though. I'd love to have a better picture, if you can manage it, as I can't see what effect there is on the leaves.

    I will tell you that 1) nothing you did mulchwise or with the soil sounds bad, and 2) I don't know of anything soilborne that would cause quite this sort of effect. The sole exception is if some of that brush you burned was walnut trees... but even then, I'd expect wilting rather than streaking and stunting.

    Just based on the one picture, I'm leaning toward a virus (probably Potato virus Y or Tobacco etch potyvirus); the stunting alone screams either nutrient problems or virus, and I rarely see bad stunting from nutrient problems outside of hydroponic setups. Better pictures would help a lot in confirming or rejecting that theory, however. (dyannel or allisoncollins, feel free to contribute pictures too, if you have them.)

    --Alison

  • starly
    13 years ago

    This is exactly my problem as well! This plant is seriously stunted whereas others are fine. Most importantly it has those knob / wart things on it. I'm just afraid that they're going to pop open and let loose hundreds of critters. Hopefully not! Any help on how to treat this would be most appreciated. I tried uploading three photos to help demonstrate the problem. Thanks! -Star

    http://photos.gardenweb.com/garden/galleries/2010/07/knobby_somethins_on_my_tomato.html

    http://photos.gardenweb.com/garden/galleries/2010/07/knobby_somethins_on_my_tomato_1.html

    http://photos.gardenweb.com/garden/galleries/2010/07/knobby_somethins_on_my_tomato_2.html

    Here is a link that might be useful: knobby stalk on my tomato plant

  • torquill
    13 years ago

    starly,

    Those "knobblies" are perfectly normal. Tomato plants often try to put down roots from any part of the stem that gets moist; they're called adventitious roots, and you find them a lot with sprawled tomatoes or ones growing in high humidity. They also tend to form as a response to damage or stress. Those knobs will turn into roots if they encounter moist soil.

    What I'm seeing on two of your pictures is a dead spot on the stem around a leaf scar... it looks like a mold such as botrytis got into the dying leaf tissue or the wound when the leaf dropped off, and formed a canker on the stem. The plant should be fine despite that, but the stress of the injury may have stimulated all those adventitious roots. They're nothing more sinister than that. :)

    --Alison

  • starly
    13 years ago

    Hi Alison,
    Thanks so much for your information. That's great news! I don't have much room for plants, so losing one like that would not have been good.

    One other question for you since I'm new to all this....
    Would you recommend replanting the plant so it sits deeper in the soil, so that the knobs and that dead spot on the stalk are covered by soil? Would that help the tomato plant grow better?
    Thanks again! -Star

  • torquill
    13 years ago

    Replanting at this stage would cause more harm than good, and it's probably doing just fine with the roots it already has. If you let it, it could form roots all the way up to the top of the highest growing tip, but it doesn't have to. That's what makes it possible to bury leggy seedlings to increase their rooting speed, though, and it allows for easy cloning by rooting clipped-off suckers.

    I suspect the plant has already routed around that dead spot on the stem, as they're good at that. I've broken stems lengthwise before (whoops) then splinted them, and come back a few weeks later to find that the edges had healed together and it was good as new. Ditto some horizontal breaks which didn't go all the way through. They're very resilient plants.

    --Alison

  • starly
    13 years ago

    Good to know! Thanks for the info -Star

  • karen58_gw
    13 years ago

    Thank You Alison, I have this problem on one of my 10 plants
    ( a"sweet 100" ,not even an heirloom.) I have been going a little nutty trying to figure it out. Thanks for the info.

0
Sponsored
Premier Home Services, Inc
Average rating: 5 out of 5 stars19 Reviews
Loudoun County Complete Turn-Key Contracting Solutions