I've always grown tomatoes in 5 gallon containers. my opinion is it could be 1 of a few things. 1) pot bound when the soil is dry, grab the stem and lift the root-ball to inspect the roots, it the soil ball comes up very easily and you can see roots covering the surface, it's time for a transplant. if the plant doesn't come out very easy don't force it and cause more damage. just check the holes in the bottom of the pot, if they are showing roots it's time to transplant. 2) a salt buildup how often do you water between feedings. if salt is built up in the plant the lower leaves will die until the entire plant is dead. the salt comes from fertilizer that is not rinsed from the soil with pure water and builds up in the roots restricting nutrient uptake by the plant. to remedy this you would water with nothing but water for 2 weeks every time the soil goes dry. tis will flush out any built up salt in the soil. check your water as well becuz city water is sometimes too acidic for plants and will effect growth dramatically. 3) Watering Time watering in the morning before 11 AM or after 5 PM helps any plant keep cool during the hottest days. the hotter parts of the day are between 11 AM and 5PM so watering during these times of the day are best avoided to prevent steaming the roots. IMO i would say it is most likely the root bound issue.

Very interesting sixtoll. I can see this could be a pleasant reason to scratch one's head wondering. It really depends on what the driver was for the decline of the plant, so you need to post us pictures - we tend to be very visual in this forum since there are so many confounding factors that get us to a diseased or dead plant and a picture is accurate worth a million words, not much different from a doctor taking the patient history but then ordering x-ray images to study. But if the plant dried up, it probably would be a better idea to start with it's cutting to build a new root system and leave behind the potential for mold and disease growing up and attacking the new growth: provided the cutting has "the right stuff". Pic, por favor :-) PS. I congratulate you for growing Floridade. This cultivar is part of an illustrious history which I personally love... Cheers PC

Sorry for my absence- way too busy this year. Wow, drought stress does look a lot like it. I guess I went too far in the opposite direction with drainage... now that I think about it, it got worse after I was away and relying on a drip hose on a timer for a little while, too. They died relatively slowly- I don't think I actually pulled them out until October, at which point they looked extremely sad but still weren't 100% dead. I was going to just use new bagged potting mix this year, mostly due to time but also to keep things from drying out too much (mostly using fabric pots now), but after planting half my transplants it's alarming how compacted it looks. I think mixing it evenly with pink bark mulch should give me roughly 5-1-1-ish proportions, and then I'll just keep a closer eye on the watering?

Sam Marie, all the preceding comments are spot on. But don't give up hope! It's stunted, for sure, and will never be what it might have been, but it's not dead. This looks like a variety that was never meant to be grown in a container all season (and there are some varieties that find that acceptable, just look for "patio tomatoes" and the like), but if you can get hold of the biggest pot you can find and still move around - say 10-15 gallons - and transplant your tomato in there (with a little help from a friend, maybe, to stabilize the top growth during the moving process), you may still get some tomatoes off it. Remove the dying foliage. Leaving it on there will only open a pathway for disease, and there are various kinds of blights that start out looking somewhat like what you've got there, and work their way up the plant, gradually killing it off. I'm not saying this is some kind of blight! Just that it's as well to remove anything unhealthy. And if you find you're removing everything on, say, the bottom 8" of plant so that there's nothing but bare stem down there, go ahead and plant it really deep in its new pot. Brand new roots will spread out from the buried parts of the stems (be sure not to bury any leaves), and your plant may be transformed almost miraculously. I've never done anything like this because I've never had to; and real Tomato Experts on this site might tell me I'm all wet. But if you were to give that plant to me and tell me to do my best with it, that'd be my move. And I'd probably get a 2 cu ft bag of Miracle Gro potting mix, to fill the pot, unless you have something else on hand, preferably "soilless" and meant for container growing. (Yes yes, everyone, I know MG is not everyone's cup of tea. But Sam is fairly new at this. It needs to be easy, I think, and that mix has served me relatively well in quite a variety of situations. I amend as necessary.) In my opinion your having kept this thing going and not looking all that bad, all things considered, in what must be a tiny pot, shows true devotion. You have paid careful attention, to get it this far. Good for you! Now for that biggest possible pot ...