Debra,
Personally I don't see anything that would excite me too much. I would keep an eye on it but it don't appear to be anything to worry about to me. Just my opinion. Others may disagree. Looks like healthy leaves and plants to me. Jay

Debra,

I agree with Jay on this one. I see nothing to be concerned about. Then again, with tomato plants, there isn't much that excites me in terms of foliar spotting or discoloration. It is normal for their foliage to have issues and I seldom see anything that bothers me enough for me to even mention it to anyone. The browning and the holes are likely from wind or something and they're a non-issue. If they bother you, you can remove them. Otherwise, I'd just ignore them.

I learned a long time ago that plants that look like crap will produce fruit just as well as (and often better than) plants that look perfect, so I just don't get excited about anything like what you're seeing. It is just a part of the plants' life. Plants get sunburn, windburn, insect damage, and all sorts of discolored foliage from all sorts of things that won't kill them. They'll still produce fine.

Dawn

Dawn,
I'm like you. I always say don't sweat the small stuff. Last night when I returned I saw a few leaves that the hot wind had burned. The leaves that wilted a week ago when they got too dry have now withered and died. If I have time I remove them. If not they will fall off. With as many plants as I have and the climate I live in I don't worry about my plants winning a beauty contest.

When I was going downtown earlier this week I went by the yard where I mentioned last summer the plants were producing when no one elses were. They never got large but had tomatoes all summer when ours wouldn't set. Looks like they have set out 2-3 plants again. Looks like they remove about a 6 inch circle of bermuda grass if that much and plant the tomato plant. Then don't mow the grass around the plants during the summer. I'm sure don't feed them or anything. It shows that tomatoes don't require all the care and worry that I'm guilty of giving them. Jay

Jay,

There's a retired gentleman a couple of miles from us who plowed up about a 12' wide by 30' long bed one year and then planted 3 tomato plants in it. They were about 10' away from one another. When I saw them, the plants were about 8' tall and 4' wide and lush and green and absolutely perfect. However, as good as they looked, they had not a flower or fruit on them and it was mid-June. I'm guessing too much nitrogen. That's NOT what my plants look like.

My plants look great in May and most of June. Then they start showing damage from heat, wind, insects and disease. Do I care? No. Who has time to worry about that? My goal is to raise as many fruit as possible, not to have perfect dark green plants. Some years, by the time they're near the end of their lives, they look horrible, but they've produced like crazy. That's what I care about...the production, not the appearance. Many plants that are too pampered don't produce much, so I sure don't pamper mine.

I had a neighbor who planted sort of like that right in the middle of her lawn. Actually, she rototilled up a plot, didn't add anything to her river bottom sand, planted the tomatoes into it and never did another thing. Didn't mow or weed. Didn't water or feed. Never removed a damaged leaf or sprayed for anything at all. Just didn't worry about it. She was a single working mother and she wanted to raise tomatoes, but she didn't have time to 'pamper' them. Her yields were as good as or better than anyone else's around here. It drove her dad crazy because he's one of those who devotes a lot of time and effort to his garden and especially to his tomato plants. One of these years, I'll try it her way....if I can ever figure out to harvest the maters without stepping on snakes because if I let mine get overgrown with grass and weeds like she did, I just know I'd have snakes.

Dawn

Thanks, Jay and Dawn. If it were some other plant with which I'm more familiar I wouldn't have thought anything about it, but after reading posts here from people mentioning blight and wilt it occurred to me that I know so little about tomato and pepper plants that I wouldn't recognize a serious problem if I saw one so I figured it best to consult the experts. ;)

Growing up I remember my dad's and granddad's vegetable gardens looking ugly compared to my grandmother's flowers yet they always produced quite well so I'm not bothered by ugly in the veggie plants so long as it's not something likely to totally devastate the plants. Now if all those flowers on my tomato plants would just become fruit!

Thanks again. You guys are such a treasure when comes to gardening information! We novices would be so lost without you.

Debra

Debra,

If you're concerned about disease, bookmark the linked website so you can look at it any time you see a suspicious 'spot' on your tomato plant foliage or stems or fruit. I'll warn you though that diseases on plants can appear quite different from the photos on websites.

About the only diseases I would be concerned about would be Septoria Leaf Spot, Bacterial Speck, Bacterial Spot or Early Blight. Even when I see them, I just try to remove damaged, diseased leaves and avoid spraying unless I think a plant is about to die. If Late Blight were common here in our state, I might get concerned about it, but it generally develops at temps between 50 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit and those temperatures are long, long, long gone here. Diseases are not as common as people think. In roughly 25 years of growing tomatoes on my own, I have seen Tomato Spotted Wilt exactly once, Southern Blight exactly once, Septoria Leaf Spot about once every 3 or 4 years (last year it was extremely bad, but I got tons of fruit anyway), Bacterial Speck or Bacterial Spot only in the rainiest springs, and Bacterial Wilt once in recently memory, and probably lost a couple of plants to it in the early 2000s, but didn't do the cut stem/water test to confirm it.

Early Blight is so common that I expect it. I remove diseased foliage and don't worry about it. My plants will produce well despite it. If I wanted to carry over the plants into fall, I might spray Daconil as a preventive, but instead I just start over with fresh, new plants for fall. For me, fresh new plants for fall give better yields than old tired spring plants carried over into fall.

If I let myself get excited about every spot or speckle on my tomato leaves, I wouldn't have time or energy for anything else. Despite how obsessed I am with growing tomatoes, I don't let myself get wound up over whatever is happening on the plants. Well, except maybe the stinkbugs. They'll ruin your fruit and nothing controls them. I saw one this morning when I was working in the garden and I reached out and cut it in half with my scissors. (That's my favorite method of bug control. Quick. Easy. Non-toxic, unless you're the affected bug.) When stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs show up, I don't freak out, but I do put on my mental armor and adopt a "me vs. them" kind of philosophy. In southern parts of Texas, they're so prolific that you might as well just pull up your plants and give up when they show up. If I gardened in southern Texas, I'd have to raise my plants in a screenhouse (which, naturally, my loving DH would build for me with a minimal amount of grumbling. OK, so he would grumble, but he'd do it.) Here, I just try to kill 'em whenever I see them. I'd rather have 18 diseases on one tomato plant than one stinkbug.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: TAMU Tomato Problem Solver