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Tomato Pests & Diseases

First time grower - Please tell me what's wrong

15 years ago

I have four small tomato plants I bought from our local home depot and planted in our raised bed we built this year. They looked great when I bought them. I've had them for about 4 weeks or so now and the bottom leaves of the plants have slowly started turning greenish brown with spots. It started out with just a few spots and some leaves were turning white around the edges but now, most of the bottom leaves on each plant have spots all over them. This is only on the bottom of the plants, the leaves from there up look great and i have blooms on all the plants except one and even small tomatoes on one plant. I've looked them over several times for any type of flies or the caterpillars and have seen nothing. So i'm assuming this is some kind of fungus or something?? Any suggestions?

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Comments (3)

aladon
15 years ago
It may just be there time to go . . . the leaves, not the tomatoes. If your growth is vigorous and you are setting fruit, I wouldn't freak out just yet. Tomatoes will show signs of planting stress sometimes especially on leaves that they already have at the time of planting. If the leaves become too damaged, or unsightly, or just yellow out completely, just take a sharp pair of scissors in the late afternoon and prune them away (I use bonsai shears.) I like to prune away everything that grows 10" or less from the ground anyway to discourage disease and encourage airflow. Getting enough air shouldn't be a problem for you, though because you look like you've got plenty of space. You look like you know what you're doing, you've got plenty of space in the row, you've got fruit growing, you look like you've got a good mulch going, bravo! You might want to take a sturdy wood stake and push it into the ground beside that cage. You can tie the cage to the stake. I recently suffered a lot of wind and storm damage to my tomato garden because my cages did not stay anchored in the ground. If you are still worried about fungus, I'd get a spray that is organically derived, or advertises being gentle on plants and give her a good spray. I am not an expert (far from it as my posting prove), but I'd think a disease would cause the plant to show more of a sign all-over. Tomatoes like to keep growing and sometimes they'll stop taking care of old leaves in favor of new growth. If you get pale or yellow new growth, try a dose of epsom salts and wait a few days and see if there is a change. Remember to use more because your plants are in the ground and water the salts in well.
jen13
15 years ago
Early blight and Septoria leaf spot both have a tendency to hit the older leaves that are closer to the ground first. To be safe, I would remove the affected foliage and get some sort of anti-fungal spray to prevent it from jumping to other tomato plants or foliage. I think that there are both organic (copper and sulphur) and non-organic (Seranade, Daconil, etc.) sprays available.
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carolinagirl13
15 years ago
i would put sevens dust on e'm to keep the bugs away so you don't get holes in your leaves!!!.....

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