Hi ladies! Y'all know that it is very distressing for me to hear that your tomto plants are misbehaving. How dare they give you trouble so early in the season. Ilene, are the whitish areas on the leaves only along the edges or scattered all over the leaves? And, with the yellowing on the leaves, is it ONLY yellowing or do you see any concentric circles in black or brown shades? G.M., I think I already responded to your questions on the other thread. Yellowing leaves are one of the most common tomato problems you will see mentioned on gardening websites. There is a reason for this. Yellow leaves are just the way that tomato plants tell you they are feeling stressed. You know how we wake up with a headache or stiff muscles or whatever? Well, tomato plants wake up and have yellow leaves. Our aches and pains are a reflection of what we have been doing to/with our bodies and their yellow leaves are a reflection of what they are going through too. The tomato plants' stress could be from one of many possible causes. Here's just a few: --too much water, esp. when plants' growth seems stalled --soil is too cool, esp. when plants' growth seems stalled --air temps are too cool, esp. when plants' growth seems stalled --any combination of the first three items listed --too much fertilizer, too often --too hot or too dry, when accompanied by leaves wilting --too much shade and not enough direct sunlight OR --too much sun "all of a sudden" after a string of cloudy days --plants have been moved from a shadier or more sheltered position, like from inside the house or on the porch, to a more exposed, sunnier position without being hardened off again Then, getting into more serious possibilities: --spider mite damage, if weather is 90 degrees or hotter and you see tiny webbing on the leaves accompanied by little red 'dots' on backs of leaves (the dots are the spider mites) --foliage disease, esp. when accompanied by brown or black concentric circles or spotting on the leaves. Could be early blight, for example, or bacterial speck. (I think it is too early for early blight and I don't usually see bacterial speck until late May either.) --systemic diseases, but there will usually be other symptoms as well, such as leaf curling and distortion or sudden wilting of plant --transplant shock if yellowing develops first week or two after plants are put into the ground --nematode damage to roots if you are gardening in EXTREMELY sandy soil Honestly, though, as I was running through the list of most likely possibilities and typing them, I was thinking to myself that most tomato plants will show some yellowing on the leaves early in the season, and it is usually just because the weather is a little cool, it is a little windy, and the soil tends to be a little wetter than they like it. I think tomatoes are happiest with the kind of weather we have from May through about the end of June, weather a little warmer than we're having now, a little less wind and a lot more heat/warmth. If the leaf yellowing is on lower leaves and does not progress up the plant, that is just early season 'less than ideal condition' type stress. If the leaf yellowing begin to move upward leaf by leaf and stem by stem, my 'early blight' alarm bells start ringing. If the yellow leaves are a symptom of too much fertilizer, your should be having bright green vigorous topgrowth while the bottom leaves are yellowing. The white leaf margins are probably just the tiniest bit of sunburn or windburn on the leaves. If new leaves have those edgesalmost as soon as they open up, though, then I would be a little more concerned. If the leaf edges have the tiniest of little brown margins and it is present all along as you are raising the seedlings (and generally is present before they are ever exposed to outdoor conditions), that is a common problem nicknamed CRUD by people on the tomato forum. It tends to go away as the plants grow and it does not seem to indicate a systemic problem, although some experts believe it may be a very mild and aberrrant type of early blight. And, girls, just for fun I am giving you the tomato problem solver link to my favorite website. (NOT because I want you to go there instead of asking me questions, but just thought you might like to see it!) I find answers here at this website when all else fails. I like to be able to look at the pictures and compare the problem I am seeing to what they show. It is an amazing website. Having grown up in Texas, so very, very much of what I learned about gardening was through Texas A&M University and the agriculture extension service they administer, so I am in my own 'comfort zone' when I use their website. Having early tomatoes is important to me (I am so impatient!), so I try to have ripe fruit by late April/early May. Some years it works and some years it doesn't. The two plants with almost-ripe tomatoes are Better Bush. I buy two plants every year as soon as Home Depot or Lowe's get them in, which tends to be around Valentine's Day in the D-FW metro area, which is where I buy them. They are usually in 5" or 6" round pots and cost $2.95 or $3.95 each. When I get them, the plant's main stems are usually about the size of your little finger and the plants are about 8" to 10" tall. I put them in 3-gallon pots as soon as I buy them, feed them some liquid seaweed and set them on the floor right beside my seed-starting shelf. On warm days I carry them outside into the sun for a few hours. On cold nights I bring them inside. They usually bloom sometime in early-to-mid-March. I usually get the first tomatoes off these plants in mid-April. They are actually a little late this year and I think it is because of all the cold weather. Judging from the size of the plants when I purchase them, they must have been started from seeds in late November or cuttings in mid- to late-December. I buy the earliest plants available for early tomatoes because I am too busy with the holiday season to start seed that early myself, and I know I will really, really be craving a home-grown tomato in February or March. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: TAMU Tomato Problem Solver

Rachel, At this point, unless you want to follow Barbara's suggestion and cut off the bottoms of the buckets, etc., then about the only thing you can do is water your 5-gallon buckets heavily (to the point that water runs freely through the drainage holes), several times a day to try and wash out the gunk left from your home remedy. There are several issues involved here. First, 5-gallon buckets are too small for indeterminate tomato plants in our climate. There's just not enough space in them for good root growth and they dry out too quickly. Of the 85 or so tomato plants that I planted this spring, about 30 of them are in containers, and 10 of those in are 5-gallon buckets. I normally only put smaller, determinate types or early-season producers in 5-gallon buckets. The smaller determinate types still won't do as well in 5-gallon buckets as they do in the ground, but they'll do reasonably well if properly fed and watered. The larger indeterminates like the varieties you mentioned above really are not at all happy in 5-gallon containers, and do much better if planted in 10 to 30 gallon containers, and the larger the container, the better they'll perform. Secondly, Blossom End Rot, while related to calcium deficiency is not purely an issue of there being a lack of calcium in the soil. Rather, BER is a physiological plant problem that results from a complex set of issues related to the availability of calcium and other nutrients in the soil in a usable form and related as well to uneven watering and, often, excess nitrogen. So, even if you have calcium in your potting mix, the plants may not be able to take it up and properly use it if something else is going on. That something else can be in the form of one or more kinds of stress, including too much fertilizer, which causes excess plant growth; uneven delivery of moisture (clearly an issue with plants in 5-gallon buckets in our climate) and even too much wind, which stresses the plants. The way that plants react to so such stresses is that the calcium essentially leaves the fruit and goes into the main part of the plant, since helping the plant is the top priority and the fruit are secondary, and that leaves the fruit deficient in calcium even though the plant itself and the soil may have adequate levels of calcium. So, if you can avoid stressing the plants, you often can avoid BER. Mulching the soil in your containers helps keep the soil from drying out as quickly and might help reduce some of the stress that causes BER too. Some of the problem may lie in your mix. Other than the calcium that would exist in your compost and manure (and there's no way to know how much calcium was in them) and maybe in the topsoil, you didn't specifically add a calcium source, so it is hard to know if your potting mix has enough calcium in it. It also is hard to know if whatever calcium it might have is in a form the plants can take up and use. Next time, try adding a handful of lime to each container and that should give you plants some calcium. Third, there's the water issue wich is hard to overcome. You want to keep the soil in your 5-gallon buckets evenly moist, but never sopping wet and never bone dry. I usually water every morning and every night and, on very hot days, sometime between noon and mid-afternoon as well. Even when you water that often, there are periods right after you water that the soil is very wet, and then of course it can get pretty dry pretty quickly in this heat. One way to overcome the watering issue is to hook up a drip irrigation system on a timer, which I haven't yet done this year, since I'm home all day and can stand there with the hose and hand water. It might take a little time and effort to figure out how often to have the drip system to come on, and how long to run it, but once you figured that out, your containers would be low maintenance. Fourth, make sure you're not overfeeding with nitrogen because if you are, it can interfere with the plants' vascular system taking up and using other nutrients that the plants need. Fifth, if you need a quick fix for BER, dissolve 1 cup of hydrated lime in 1 gallon of water and feed some of it to each plant. Then, try not to water those containers again until the next day so the plants have time to take up and use the lime. Sixth, tomato plants that are struggling in containers are often underfed. This occurs because the fairly heavy watering needed to keep their soil moist often leaches out the nutrients they need before they can take them up and use them. You can work around this by feeding them every other day with a water-soluable fertilizer diluted to 1/4 its normal rate. Sometimes they also benefit from a period feeding of Epsom Salts. You mix 1 T. of Epsom Salts with 1 gallon of water in a watering can, stir it up and feed some to each plant. The Epsom Salts give the plants sulfur and magnesium and often greens up and perks up struggling tomato and pepper plants. I have no idea what the milk might have done to your plants, but at this point, it doesn't sound like it helped them. My big concern is that something in the milk will encourage the growth of harmful bacteria or fungal spores. Growing in a container is quite different from growing in the ground and plants can go downhill very rapidly if they get too dry even just one time, if they are routinely too dry or starved for nutrition, if they are poorly draining and stay too wet, or if they are struck by disease. Next year, it probably would help to mix in some form or organic tomato food with the soil in each container. Each year I add Espoma Tomato Tone plant food to each container and also a handful of bone meal and blood meal as well. I do reuse the soil in the containers each year, and just add the plant foods I mentioned above plus some compost and manure to put some nutrition back into the soil to replace what was used up by the plants during the previous season. If you can't get the pots to drain any better, drill or poke more holes in them. I am concerned that either the rocks or the gunk from the milk or both are blocking your drainage holes. The rocks, by the way, are not necessary at all. Dawn

I plant in large containers, about 15 gallons or so and use nothing but 100% miracle grow potting soil with the moisture control and then top it with 2" of cypress mulch. I water my plants HEAVY every single day and in the summer when it is 90 degrees plus I water TWICE per day. All the excess flows right out the bottom and the plants drink the rest everyday. Tomatoes need lots of water and very good drainage. You may not have very good drainage in the ground. If you plant in the ground it is best to dig a DEEP hole fill the bottom with sand and gravel, about 2 feet worth then fill with good potting soil. This plant was 4" tall about 4 weeks ago. Its now over 3' tall and about 2+' across. I net them to keep out squirrels, birds, moths/butterflies. The other one is over 4' tall (max height it is supposed to get) and has about 60+ tomatoes on it. A Better Bush variety.

I posted this in the Container forum as well, and someone else did suggest that they are probably getting too much water. The buckets have black plastic over them, and I occasionally mist the top because I wasn't sure if the yellow dying leaves were because of too little water. They also suggested that the 70/20/10 mixture I got from GlobalBuckets is not suited well for the tomatoes because it will hold too much moisture, but that my 3,2,1 mix (Raybo's I believe) should be fine. I wonder if I should just pull the plants in the containers with the globalbucket mixture and redo the soil using the 3,2,1?