He had his feelings hurt and he's mad at me :-( Sorry, but the breadcasting of sad 'ol husband's tales is a bit of a pet peeve for me. Nita, a visit (or call) to your local extension office will help you find out how to take samples and get them sent to the state lab. Some state universities have had to severely cut back on their services but hopefully you can get some help. Lab tests can be just as important in eliminating possibilities as in clinical diagnosis. The problem with something like this is that it could be a combination of things as has been suggested. You'd be fascinated by the interrelationships between nutrition, environment, pathogen, and other pests. You've stated that this occurs every year. Have you observed problems with any other garden plants? Do you live in an area where nematodes are a known problem? In which state do you live? I guess you can see that we all love a mystery!

Everyone is saying "MULCH"! >> I have added several inches of mulch around the tomatoes and cucumbers >> I used a composted soil amendment as mulch Mulch is insulation. Like fiberglass insulation (which would work, in its own weird way!) the thicker the better. Also it's best dry on top, damp on the bottom where it touches that non-insulating soil amendment, and airy in the middle. Several inches isn't a lot if you are having problems that could be linked to heat and humidity. Tomato roots are impressive water sucker-uppers. IF they're healthy. Water and healthy roots do not add up to heat wilt, even without shade cloth. I have conditions similar to yours: heat, sun and wind. What the tomatoes DO have is gangster roots, and they haven't the slightest tendency to wilt. YET. Knock on wood. I just jinxed it, didn't I? Are you absolutely SURE that the watering goes down to an appreciable depth? Water it with a dribble for hours! Since there's no such thing as water wilt on a grown tomato that's not going to die, what do you have to lose? Then add another four inches of straw on the previous four.

Bubbadillo, I confess to being somewhat baffled by this. It looks "kind of, sort of" like several things, but not really like any of them. Because both the Burneyville Mesonet station and our house went down to 31 degrees in the early hours of the morning of May 3rd, I was leaning towards some sort of patchy freeze or frost damage. However, I've never seen such widespread patchy damage like this attributed to marginally cold weather like you had at 38 degrees. I have seen similar damage when plants were covered with plastic to keep the frost off. Any place the plant actually touched the plastic during the time that frost occurred, you saw damage similar to what is on your plants. However, on the plants I saw it on, each plant had a mere handful of spots. Your spotting is incredibly widespread. If you had just purchased the tomato plants and just transplanted them into their containers, I'd think they weren't properly hardened off and had sunscald. However, if you've had them for five weeks, then surely you've had them in the sun for most of that time. It bothers me that the plants at two separate stores and at your house show the same symptoms and that points to some sort of environmental stress. It is unlikely the plants in the stores now are the same ones that were there 5 weeks ago when you purchased your plants. Thus, a disease seems unlikely to have suddenly popped up in your plants that you've had 5 weeks and also in newer shipments of plants at that exact same time. If BP had been shipping diseased bean plants and tomato plants for 5 weeks, we all would have heard about it by now. It also looks a little like several nutritional deficiencies, but not enough like one specific deficiency that I think that is the answer. Tomato foliage issues are notoriously hard to diagnose from photos because we lack context. For example, if I see a slight problem developing today, I'm checking the plant day to day and I know how and when it started, what the conditions were like, how it looked the next day, and then the next and the next. All that time, I'm noting how it is or isn't progressing and also whether any thing I am doing is helping it or not. Looking at one photo taken on one day doesn't give us that context. Having said all of that, yours doesn't look like an disease damage I've ever seen. However, my experience with tomato diseases is limited to just a handful of issues like early blight, late blight, septoria leaf spot, bacterial speck, bacterial spot, tomato spotted wilt, bacterial wilt, cloudy spot, tomato yellow leaf curl, curly top, southern blight, BER (actually a physiological issue, not a disease), fusarium wilt and pith necrosis. That sounds like a lot, but I've grown tomatoes a lot of years and have only seen each of those a couple of times in my own garden. For example, I've only seen southern blight once and tomato spotted wilt once. There are many, many more diseases out there that I've never seen first-hand. Are there any other vegetable plants nearby that this is not appearing on? If so, what are they? That might give us a clue. And, FYI, frost can form at 38 or 39 degrees under some conditions. Carol, Maybe it his malation damage, but it seems odd it would show up at his plants he's had for 5 weeks the very same time it showed up on plants in Ardmore. I suppose stranger things have happened? Bubbadillo, I just had another thought. Have your plants had minor hail damage in the last week? We had very small hail here at our house and also down in Thackerville on Sunday afternoon. At our house this hail was not large enough to hurt the leaves, but after the previous hail a couple of weeks ago, (that hail which quite a bit larger), I had a lot of damage and everywhere the onion leaves were hit by hail, there are little bad spots kind of like what you have on your plants. Dawn

Sheri, The blossoms themselves have nothing to do with blossom end rot. It is really just a physiological problem involving calcium uptake, and the blossom has nothing to do with that--once the fruit has set, the blossom is just "an innocent bystander". You can pick the blossom off after a fruit has formed, but it won't have any effect either way. I think you and I both should be VERY grateful that our plants are alive and producing in this wild and wacky weather, because it appears we are in the minority who are having success. One of my "old rancher" neighbors stopped by to see me yesterday. He said he was being nosy and just wanted to know how my tomatoes were doing. I told him that it was a rough year and that I was getting ripe tomatoes, but not as many and not as early as in previous years. He told me that "no one" in Love County was getting any tomatoes at all---well, that is, except for the two of us. He ran down the long list of tomato growers we both know, and some that I don't know, describing what was wrong with their plants or what had happened to their plants. He described the plants of one of his friends who farms down on sandy river-bottom soil as being totally defoliated ("not a single leaf") and wanted to know why. I told him I assumed they were in high water underground since he was so close to the river, and that the leaf drop was a sign the plants weren't going to make it. He said that was what he thought too. He then asked me what I was doing with my tomatoes, and I told him we'd been eating them. I told him I made a big pot of spaghetti sauce earlier in the week, and a big pot of tortilla soup later in the week. He asked if I made them with my green tomatoes, and I told him I used ripe ones. (I didn't really understand his question----was he trying to imply I didn't have ripe tomatoes?) Anyway, I think maybe he was hoping I would offer him some of our ripe tomatoes---but I didn't. I have plans for them, and I know he IS getting ripe tomatoes, so I am not giving him mine. What I think he REALLY wanted was for me to give him 5 or 10 gallons of ripe tomatoes to take and give away to all his farmer/rancher buddies who have suffered a tomato crop failure this year. I did that in 2004, but I am not giving as many away this year because I feel like the harvest could cease anytime, especially if the rain continues. So, there you have it....I am being selfish and stingy and not giving away tomatoes this year, and I am unapologetic about it. In the good years, I give away hundreds of tomatoes, but in the bad years, everyone else is on their own. After what I have had to go through to get this harvest, it is not walking out the door with someone else. Isn't that a terrible attitude--I am NOT usually like that. I really cherish each and every tomato I get this year, though, because it has been such a hard year and a large harvest is not guaranteed. With six inches of rain since Friday evening, I am afraid my plants are in serious trouble. Watch your plants---they can go downhill VERY fast at this point. If the yellowing progresses rapidly up the plants, you can take cuttings from the healthiest foliage at the top of the plant and root them in water or soil. In just a couple of weeks those cuttings will provide you with new plants in case yours decline/die quickly. I have gone from a garden full of semi-healthy plants to a garden full of dead plants in about a month's time in very rainy weather. Once the sun comes out and begins stressing plants already stressed by excessive moisture, early blight and other problems gather steam like a fast freight train. Dawn