He had his feelings hurt and he's mad at me :-( Sorry, but the breadcasting of sad 'ol husband's tales is a bit of a pet peeve for me. Nita, a visit (or call) to your local extension office will help you find out how to take samples and get them sent to the state lab. Some state universities have had to severely cut back on their services but hopefully you can get some help. Lab tests can be just as important in eliminating possibilities as in clinical diagnosis. The problem with something like this is that it could be a combination of things as has been suggested. You'd be fascinated by the interrelationships between nutrition, environment, pathogen, and other pests. You've stated that this occurs every year. Have you observed problems with any other garden plants? Do you live in an area where nematodes are a known problem? In which state do you live? I guess you can see that we all love a mystery!

Bubbadillo, I confess to being somewhat baffled by this. It looks "kind of, sort of" like several things, but not really like any of them. Because both the Burneyville Mesonet station and our house went down to 31 degrees in the early hours of the morning of May 3rd, I was leaning towards some sort of patchy freeze or frost damage. However, I've never seen such widespread patchy damage like this attributed to marginally cold weather like you had at 38 degrees. I have seen similar damage when plants were covered with plastic to keep the frost off. Any place the plant actually touched the plastic during the time that frost occurred, you saw damage similar to what is on your plants. However, on the plants I saw it on, each plant had a mere handful of spots. Your spotting is incredibly widespread. If you had just purchased the tomato plants and just transplanted them into their containers, I'd think they weren't properly hardened off and had sunscald. However, if you've had them for five weeks, then surely you've had them in the sun for most of that time. It bothers me that the plants at two separate stores and at your house show the same symptoms and that points to some sort of environmental stress. It is unlikely the plants in the stores now are the same ones that were there 5 weeks ago when you purchased your plants. Thus, a disease seems unlikely to have suddenly popped up in your plants that you've had 5 weeks and also in newer shipments of plants at that exact same time. If BP had been shipping diseased bean plants and tomato plants for 5 weeks, we all would have heard about it by now. It also looks a little like several nutritional deficiencies, but not enough like one specific deficiency that I think that is the answer. Tomato foliage issues are notoriously hard to diagnose from photos because we lack context. For example, if I see a slight problem developing today, I'm checking the plant day to day and I know how and when it started, what the conditions were like, how it looked the next day, and then the next and the next. All that time, I'm noting how it is or isn't progressing and also whether any thing I am doing is helping it or not. Looking at one photo taken on one day doesn't give us that context. Having said all of that, yours doesn't look like an disease damage I've ever seen. However, my experience with tomato diseases is limited to just a handful of issues like early blight, late blight, septoria leaf spot, bacterial speck, bacterial spot, tomato spotted wilt, bacterial wilt, cloudy spot, tomato yellow leaf curl, curly top, southern blight, BER (actually a physiological issue, not a disease), fusarium wilt and pith necrosis. That sounds like a lot, but I've grown tomatoes a lot of years and have only seen each of those a couple of times in my own garden. For example, I've only seen southern blight once and tomato spotted wilt once. There are many, many more diseases out there that I've never seen first-hand. Are there any other vegetable plants nearby that this is not appearing on? If so, what are they? That might give us a clue. And, FYI, frost can form at 38 or 39 degrees under some conditions. Carol, Maybe it his malation damage, but it seems odd it would show up at his plants he's had for 5 weeks the very same time it showed up on plants in Ardmore. I suppose stranger things have happened? Bubbadillo, I just had another thought. Have your plants had minor hail damage in the last week? We had very small hail here at our house and also down in Thackerville on Sunday afternoon. At our house this hail was not large enough to hurt the leaves, but after the previous hail a couple of weeks ago, (that hail which quite a bit larger), I had a lot of damage and everywhere the onion leaves were hit by hail, there are little bad spots kind of like what you have on your plants. Dawn

reebiemac, Sorry to hear that it was contaminated manures. The material is used by so many gardeners who are expecting abundant harvests. Instead, the nasty outcome is truly heart-breaking. Re-read the clopyralid docs & take time to digest what's in them. You can grow a number of things this year without problems. Then by managing the garden area as directed in the docs, the soil will be fine within a year. To be certain, bio-assay that year's compost before you put it in the soil or put in any sensitive plants. But all in all, you've learned a valuable lesson for future years: Bio-assay any added organic matter before adding it to your garden areas. This guideline applies to all compost, that composted on the farm or commercially or even the bagged stuff, as a just-in-case preventive measure.

So I was digging in the garden in order to get my soil samples for soil test and bioassay.. And I found what I think could be the culprit -- tree roots! so much information out there and not sure what to do. When I was a kid gardening involved the backbreaking work of turning about 2 feet of soil in our beds every spring. I didn't really know why I was doing it other than Dad told me to. Some say now that that is bad for the soil so I didn't do it with this bed but I think I'd be in a lot better shape had I done it. Still going to do the tests though.