Speck can be cured and the plants can grow out of it. When I had it I removed all the spotted leaves and sprayed something organic and they rebounded. The worst problems are the viruses. If you get a serious virus you should just give up and start over.

I honestly try very hard NOT to be overparanoid about things like this. I do not ever use anything in my garden except for homemade compost. I don't even add things to my soil as most gardeners do. I am also the person who uses steam to clean her house instead of chemicals when at all possible. I also figure though that for the times I do need to buy things in the stores, like right now when my garden is being moved and my canned goods are running out, I have little control over what they have done to the plants they grew my food on and they probably did WAY worse than a little copper fungicide. I don't have pets, but I do have a now 3 and 4 year old. Last year when they were 2 and 3 I didn't let them in the garden for the day I sprayed , but after that I let them back in. BUT, my kids also don't munch on leaves (well not of the tomato plants anyway) so I am not sure how I would feel about that. I am not sure what your plan for next year is, but I did my research before deciding to move my garden for other reasons. I was going to do solar sterilization. You will obviously need to do something otherwise you will have the same issue next year that you have this year. I will add a link below to solar sterilization. I haven't tried it, but with my tomatoes dying off early I figured I had enough time to cut my losses cover the garden up and bake the soil if I needed to get it ready for this year. I would be curious if anyone on GW has tried it. Here is a link that might be useful: Soil solarization

From the research I've just been doing on my early blight, which is what I see on yours (not the dreaded late blight), you need to get ALL of the affected leaves off there, because the spores are easily transferred from leaf to leaf, and yes, continue spraying. Serenade is an organic spray that's often recommended, and Daconil is also very popular (I don't know if it's organic though). And when you pluck off all those leaves (very carefully, so as not to spread the spores even more), you should bag them up very carefully and tightly, or burn them. Don't compost them, because you'll just be incubating the spores into your compost, which will cause further trouble. Good luck! We're in NJ and were nailed by the same rainy weather you probably had, so it's been quite the uphill battle for us too.

The bacterium that causes Bacterial Speck with tomatoes is not the same as the one that infects peppers, so no problem there. For next year I suggest you do a few things. First, you can turn over the soil where you have your tomatoes and with a shovel, not with a rototiller, and that buries the bacteria and spores that fall to the ground from infected plants. When buried deeply they can't do damage. If not buried deeply then your plants can get what's called Splashback reinfection from rain or irrigation splashing the spores and bacteria back onto the plant. One thing that helps is to mulch the plants to prevent splashback. All NEW infections are aquired via wind and rain, so as soon as you set the plants out you need to start on a regular vigorous spray schedule. There's no knowing what might hit your plants next year so if it were me I'd start with the anti-fungal Daconil first. If you start seeing any evidence of bacterial foliage infections then add something copper to your spray schedule. But don't mix the two together since that dilutes the number of molecules in the Daconil that attach to the specific receptor sites on the upper leaf surface and prevents attachment of those fungal pathogens. And with dilution not allthosesites will be covered. Is protection total? No, no product is 100% effective, but some of them do help. I can think of very few folks who have NEVER had tomato plants with foliage diseases so what you're experiencing is experienced by millions of backyard tomato growers. As for your seed sources, I'm a long time Life Time member of SSE and I happen to think that the prices asked for in the Public catalog are way too high. Just my opinion. And personally I gave up on Burpee many many years ago for several reasons. There are some terrific seed sites, many of them family owned, that offer LOTS of varieties for a more decent price, again, IMO. and in these economic times I think they deserve our support b'c it's they, who help preserve varieties, by offering them. And there are many threads here at GW whiich list what some of those sites are. I'll mention just a few where I know the owners well and trust what they do: Sandhill Presrvation Tomato Growers Supply ( also hybrids) Gleckler Seedmen Victory Seeds Heritage Seeds in CA Heirloom Seeds in PA Tania at her website sells seeds for about 600 varieties and also has a superb website with pages for over 3,000 varieties, with comments from others, pictures and seed sources for the varieties where known, and I'll link to it below if you don't know about it. It looks like her site is down right now but hopefully that's temporary associated with weather in British Columbia Casey's Heirloom tomatoes of Airdrie, Canada Well those are a few and no doubt I've left off some sites, but the above are ones that I sent seeds for new varieties for trial each year, with few exceptions, so I do know them well and trust all of those sites and there are some sites I cannot suggest at all. Carolyn