btw...if you right click on the image and save/copy the image url and paste it in your browser you can see these a little bigger.

Thanks, here is the answer from my local extension. I guess it is all over our area after 2 weeks of rain: Your tomatoes (and most tomatoes on farms) have septoria leaf spot, a fungal disease that is a little more aggressive than early blight. Most fungal and bacterial diseases start on the lower leaves and work their way up the plant. If you have the option to pull a few plants with this disease and plant some from a local greenhouse, that may protect the rest of the planting. If the spots are on too many plants to pull them all, then you can at least slow it down by removing lower leaves. Without a commercial fungicide, it may still spread.

No. nothing to do with when they get the disease. They are two different diseases.

THe best preventative for the two fungal foliage diseases, Early Blight and Septoria Leaf Spot in Daconil and Ortho does make a good Daconil product. Be sure to get the one with 29.6% active ingredient which is chlorothalinol. And start on a rigorous spray schedule when you put the plants out side. What Daconil does is to block the specific attachment sites on the leaf surface so that the those two pathogens can't attach. And Daconil is also the best we have in helping to precent Late blight as well, if you look at quite a few wesites, and that's even more important since LB can quickly become lethal while the two fungal foliage pathogens are less devastating. Whether or not any of the foliage diseases is present in any one season is primarily due to their presence in rain droplets and they are transmitted just by air alone. But if diseased plants shed the spores to the ground then the next year one can get what's called splashback infection from those spores that were shed to the ground when rain or irrigation splashes them back up onto the lower foliage and then the disease progresses upwards on the plants. Carolyn