Okay, I'll stop putting them out for awhile. Is there anything else I can do to help them recover? Sorry but I don't think you understand what we are saying. You cannot radically change the environment of a plant without damage. The damage is done now since they weren't hardened off first so you might as well leave them out. The damaged parts will die and fall off but the new growth will slowly replace it and should be ok . Taking them back inside only to move them back out side later on will only reverse the progress made and then cause more damage. Plants need to be very gradually - over a period of 7-10 days - exposed to the the outside when they have been grown indoors. This is called Hardening Off and there are FAQs here as well as lots of internet info about it.. They never go from inside directly into the bright sun. Rather they go in slow steps from inside out into the world. First to sheltered shade like a screen porch or under a deck, then into shade protected from wind and high temps, then into light sun for a few hours, and gradually over several days into more and more sun for longer periods. And once they start out they don't go back indoors again except briefly in the case of severe storms or such. Dave

Agreed, the problem is likely in the soil you are using. For the first 5 weeks stage the plants are vulnerable to disease when you use contaminated soil. The soil should be lighter/aerated, otherwise it will retain water and not allow for healthy root growth, which will quickly be attacked by pathogens (fungi) in the soil. Your soil has with weeds, so clearly is not sterile. The weeds have different soil requirements and may grow well but not the tomato or pepper. Try to sterilize your soil in boiling water next time for at least a 5 minute boil. Get some rice hulls (waste from rice), reboil them and mix them 1/2 hulls with 1/2 soil well mixed with clean hands (not after touching other vegetables). ThAt is a better soil. Substitute the hulls with coconut husk coir for better results and as you know, water more carefully not drowning the roots. Good luck! cheers PC

-BUMP- What kind of pesticide and for what purpose? Hmm that pot is quite small for a plant with that many peppers on it. I also can't imagine it getting enough light in the UK indoors the way it is, though you clearly have gotten it to produce some peppers. Hopefully, the bump will get someone more knowledgeable than I am to come along and help you. But for me, as a rule, I try not to add insult to injury, LOL. :) If it got drenched for a day, no biggie if it just gets dried again, but then spraying it on top of the soaked soil could have shocked it. Basically, it went from indoor to outdoor to flooding to spraying in 24 hours. It's worrisome that a plant that size has not sucked up that moisture in the soil in a full week...

Hi Matt, It is hard to diagnose a disease from a photo because the photo captures only one point in time. Sometimes, there's also multiple diseases and issues occuring at once which also makes it very difficult to diagnose. I find it easier (though not always easy) to diagnose a disease by the way it first appears and the progresses over time. It does look fungal in nature. Other than that I won't attempt to pin it down, other than to say I think more than one thing is going on and at least some of what I see is Early Blight. Once fungal diseases appear, you cannot cure the plants of the disease. All you can do is try to slow it down, and you've already been doing that with the use of your homemade fungicide spray and by removing infected foliage. Sometimes that approach enables us to keep the plants going for quite a while, and sometimes not. I have found commercial fungicides more effective than homemade ones, but none of them is a curative for fungal disease. Have you been feeding and watering the plants regularly? Plants that are lacking in moisture or nutrients have a hard time fighting disease, and I found my tomato plants improved quite a bit and put out a lot of new growth after I fed them once and watered them a couple of times over a 2-week period. My plants have developed a wide range of issues after we had about 3 solid weeks where they were wet for a good portion of every day, whether it was from rain, drizzle, fog, mist, heavy dew, etc. and some diseases can start growing on plants that are wet for only 15 minutes. So, clearly the three wet weeks in late May/early June led to a lot of tomato issues. I sprayed with a fungicide (Daconil twice, Copper twice), on a 7-10 day schedule, alternating to help prevent any disease present from developing a tolerance of the same fungicide. The kind of fungicides used by home gardeners are preventive or protective and work by coating the leaves to prevent fungal spores from attaching to the foliage. Because it is very hard to get 100% coverage of every part of every plant, some disease usually manages to get around the fungicide and attach and grow. Fungicides are most effective when used from Day 1 that the plants go into the ground. When you don't start using them until after the plants are sick, all they can do is help slow down the progression of the disease a bit. They won't cure the plant and likely won't even save it. After I had sprayed 4 times, I stopped and decided I'd just try to get through the harvest period and then put in new plants for fall (though not in the same exact spot). Then I fed and watered the plants, and even some that were almost dead seem to be rebounding, so you might try that. It has been almost two weeks since I fed them, so I might feed them again and see if I see continued improvement. I do think the timing of the usual diseases follows a predictable pattern---generally first appearing on the plants when they are setting, enlarging and ripening a large amount of fruit, and much more in a wet period than in a dry period, so often drought years are not bad disease years. I feel like the plants are putting so much energy into fruiting at the time that they are maturing a crop that they do not have any energy left to resist the diseases, and this may be why hungry plants seem more prone to disease, or at least why diseased plants seem to improve and put out some new foliage and perk up a bit after being fed. That new foliage, though, will contract the same diseases if you aren't spraying funigicides regularly and if you aren't removing all the diseased foliage. Like you, I cannot remove all the diseased foliage or the plants would be naked and the fruit sunscalded, so I've just removed as much as I thought that I could without there being sunscald. Do all your plants have the same thing? Mine don't. Some have Early Blight, some have Alternaria Canker, some have Septoria Leaf Spot and some have Black Mold. A few had bacterial speck when the weather was cooler, but they improved after we warmed up. Some have more than one thing going on, and some have no diseases. All of them are under attack by spider mites, stink bugs and possibly Tomato Russet Mites. We've been harvesting lots of tomatoes, so I am just about beyond caring what the plants look like at this point. I also know that there is only so much we can do to keep the plants alive once diseases and pests hit in the hot summer months. I think that with most plants, I'll be able to harvest all the full-sized fruit, and then I'll yank out the sick plants and leave the few healthy ones. And, for anyone who's wondering what plants are withstanding the onslaught of diseases best so far this year, they are: Nebraska Wedding, True Black Brandywine, Vorlon, Burpee's Big Daddy, Rocky, Heinz 1350, Stump of the World, Early Girl, SunGold and Ildi. It was a pretty wonderful tomato year until the wet spell hit in late May and then the whole gamut of diseases and pests seemed to come out of nowhere. Some years are just this way. I have fresh plants for fall and hope the diseases will run their course in the heat and just go away, and that the fall plants don't have the same problems. Dawn