Several years ago I had issues with Blossom End Rot on long slender plum type tomatoes. It usually happens early in te bearing seaon if the weather is very hot and they are growing too fast. Extra calcium is needed to reduce BER and, it can be both applied to soil as well as calcium chloride mixed with water and sprayed on the foliage. A few tomnatoes after that looked fine, but when cut open, were all black inside where the seed cavities are. Being plum types, very little liquid and hard greenish black cores are not usefukl in canning. To avoid the blight next year. Don't plant tomatoes in the same area every year. Doing so will just culture teh soil for a new onset of the same nasty stuff from the year before. Since the blight issue, I never plant in the same locations anymore, and move my small tomato patch to different areas of the garden every year. The same with sweet cherry peppers, as last years insides were all dark color seeds and didn't ripen to red like they should. NEVER use that much oil in any home canning recipe unless its been approved, and not by grandma.

For a couple of years I had a garden spot away from my house, with no water supply available so if I wanted to supplement rainfall I had to haul gallon jugs of water. To make my watering efficient, when I planted my peppers & tomatoes in the spring, I dug down and buried empty gallon plastic jugs, one between each plant. I had poked 4-5 holes in the bottom of each, of course, and left the caps on until later in the summer. Once the weather warmed, and after a good soaking rain, I mulched the beds 4-6" deep with chopped leaves, being sure to cover the tops of the (so far empty and still capped) bottles to protect them from the sun since I had found that the plastic degrades and becomes brittle when exposed to the sun. (In previous years, just cultivating around the bottles inevitably resulted in my breaking the tops off by midsummer.) When the weather reached a point where I actually needed to water, I cleared the mulch away for the moment and poured a gallon of water into each buried bottle. I set the cap loosely back atop each bottle to keep the leaf debris from falling in and clogging the exit holes in the bottom, then pulled the mulch back up to protect the plastic. I did not care about how long it took for the bottle to empty-- it seemed like a gallon or two a week per plant was sufficient, and the best part is that by burying the bottles the water went right down to the root zone where it was most effective. As for using wall-o-waters, since I had gotten some free from a friend, I tried them last year with 3 really early tomato plants I started specifically to experiment with. While they survived a good bit of frosty weather, in the end the plants I had started weeks later and planted out a month after the first ones when the weather had warmed quickly caught up to the wall-o-water ones and all the tomatoes pretty much bloomed & set fruit at the same time & rate. So my conclusion is that it was satisfying to my eager gardener's soul to be out planting early, but it really made no difference in overall plant performance. I have found the same to be true with early plantings of such things as peas and salad crops, too. Early plantings may survive, but later plantings quickly catch up and may even surpass earlier ones that have been stressed by the weather.

It is neither early blight nor late blight. Right now I would say that they have a bit of septoria. If I look closely at one or two of those photos, there are some signs of it. Also, there could be an issue with either over-watering or soggy soil that's not draining well. Of course, we can't do a lot about all this rain, *sigh*. For the septoria, which doesn't look horrible right now, I would use a fungicide for vegetables - one that contains Chlorothalonil (Daconil, Ortho Garden). Use according to package directions. All fungicides must be used as preventatives; none are curative. They will not kill existing disease but will keep it from starting and spreading. And, they must be applied regularly. If you are gardening organically, I would go with one of the copper-based fungicides. Follow package directions for dilutions and frequency of application. Now I'll let you in on a little secret here in the Northeast: :-) Septoria is usually transient. Once the weather dries out and the temps increase, it will stop progressing. It is the cool, wet weather that creates the environment for it to thrive. So, you don't normally get a fungicide just for septoria. However, a fungicide will help prevent early blight, which is very common and far more difficult to arrest. And, if there happens to be any late blight around, it will help to prevent that as well. So it's worth using to prevent other fungal diseases. You can remove the affected leaves, but don't feel that you have to remove every leaf that has a small spot or two. As the septoria stops, it will just leave a few spots on an otherwise perfectly good leaf. However, if you're looking at cool temps and rain for another week, you may want to be more aggressive about removing affected leaves. Some folks say that you should bag the affected foliage and throw it in the garbage to prevent the spread of disease. Do that, but don't think it will forever eliminate septoria and early blight. Those fungi are all over -- in the air, in rain droplets -- so you can be extremely fastidious and still get those fungus diseases. Just an FYI. Happy gardening!

According to UCONN Integrated Pest Management, Daconil or Maconozeb are the best but some resistance has developed to it in some strains of the late blight bacteria, so they recommend farmers combine the use of one of the two with a systemic fungicide and alternate which ones they use because resistance can develop in a single season. This is a very bad disease to have spreading early to mid way into the season. It goes beyond arguments for and against the use of fungicides in home gardens. If you let it get out of control in your garden you are helping the spread of the spores, which threaten commercial crops and farmer's incomes. I am certainly in favor organic options, but keep a very close eye on your plants so if they don't work, you are willing and able to remove infected plants as soon as you are unable to keep up with removing infected leaves promptly. You also could be threatening your future crops, because I believe it can winter over in the soil. Sue Here is a link that might be useful: UCONN IPM: click on vegetables then weekly pest message