Joel zero you cannot believe how many people make the same sometimes fatal mistake of not wrapping their plants before taking them to their car. I have seen people carrying palms ficus trees etc to their cars in blinding snow storms with temperatures below 0 degrees f . It's kind of funny when you know you can't do that. Your tree doesn't look that bad . You are probably going to loose lots of leaves but I am sure it will make it. I don't know if I would put in direct sun for right now it may dry the leaves even more right now. I would put it in the strongest in direct light for now then after a few days moving it to direct sunshine. Misting lightly is also a good idea. I am sure spring will take care of your tree. Brian

Once a week water to a young tree in Orinda is much too little. Unless of course your specific planting location is getting hydration from another source (i.e. from a neighbor's yard up the hill, adjacent sprinkler leak, etc). Echo above; check the hydration with a dowel/skewer. Also check the pH. EBMUD delivers very alkaline water to me here in Danville. I need to add vinegar to it so that the roots can absorb the food. [1 Tbsp per 1.5 gal watering can] You may have burnt the roots as i did 2 years ago. Too much fertilizer for the level of hydration. Be patient with the recovery. Forgo the solid fertilizer until next year; give it a weekly dose of the FP (and vinegar if needed). Good Luck! - George

I would be concerned about Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus (TSWV). I've only read about it and seen it in pictures, but it has been quite prevalent in the southeast. Your plant looks a lot like the photos linked below. This is a virus that's spread by thrips. There's not much you can do about it. I would destroy the affected plant (sorry) and hope that your other plant has not been infected. Here is a link that might be useful:

Dan, I've used a few different mixes in containers and I like the sound of your sea soil. The problem with containers is that the system is really too small to set up a true organic soil system in them. People do all sorts of things and may technically get away with it, but I my abilities can't do a completely organic soil and get reliable production, since any "help" and you kid yourself that it is "almost organic". That said, I had some luck with a mixture of 1/3 compost (Black Kow Composted Organic), 1/3 peat & 1/3 perlite in summer but you must watch it doesn't get waterlogged. I know it sounds strange, but raw perlite is "organic". You could put some of those fancy rock dusts in there and dolomitic lime and give it a whirl. Problem is at some point your plants will need the nutrient boost of something like Miracle Gro, which is not organic, but not as bad as some make it out to be, either! There are some Fox Farms hydroponic/organic and Dutch Master hydro organic ones, but these things are really cost intensive and there is no way I could afford to even evaluate them. Tomato-Tone is organic and you can use some of it (the affordable option I would use) but a lot of experimentation is necessary to get it right in a bucket. Those are the tools I would use. There are others that are more expert than I am in this forum on organic methods in a container, but the problem is that ingredients and climates can vary enough that a lot of experimentation is necessary anyway and it is a bit much to ask of a container considering the nutrient demands of a big tomato plant. And a bigger contaner ( say, 25 gallons) can be costly to fill with organic nutrients only. There are other much more economic ways to go if you drop the requirement of deriving all nutrition from "organic" sources, for example pine mulch, etc, is cheap but offers no nutrition so it doesn't get you anywhere nutrient wise, though it might help you save on perlite. I can't answer whether your tap is appropriate for your plant, even knowing the pH is 7.5. That's because it will be the interaction among the tap, soil ingredients and amendments that determine the pH of the container. For example, if your soil starts on the acid side which it likely will it needs to be neutralized with some lime, but you can do what I do ... put less in and water with alkaline water for a while. Clearly that is not an optimal situation but to be honest my plants do fine despite all the issues with pH, and my tap is pH 7.7. But this is a fragil relationship and the only way to now for sure is to pH test your soil while you grow toget the hang of what's happening, if you are really enthusiastic. Just because it works for me, btw, doesn't mean it will work for everyone. We get lots of rain here and that frequently washes trhough soil mixesand I purposely open the tops wide to encourage that. No residue builds up from the tap or any of my not-organic supplements due to the rain. The common wisdom of hydroponics of a vegetative and a reproductive period fertilization schemes doesn't seem very pronounced to me when growing the tomato for the long haul. To be perfectly honest, I think all these mantras about vegetative stages and drastic changes during flowering stages are geared towards high value crops LOL. Really with tomato plants you want to keep the nitrogen at a baseline, low in all of my scenarios. You are not growing vines, they get quickly unmanageable for indeterminates and make few tomatoes, and most everyone here seems to agree that being pretty stingy with nitrogen is the way to go. That's the opposite of what you've done. When I grow my tomatoes, my seedlings have only 1/2 to 2/3 the nitrogen the producing plants do, so my nitrogen rate actually increases for me. At the end I back off though because the plants get less productive and unmanageable so there's a lot of give and take. Hope that helps a little, because nothing is as easy as it seems, so most people find something that works and get pretty stuck to it. Cheers PC