I live in kentucky and I have 2 roma plants. I planted them at the end of April and they are still about 1 and 1/2 feet tall. They have started producing some tomatoes but the new stem growth is turning brown and curling up and dying. Also, the leafs are starting to get spots. In the pics you should be able to see. I have been fertilizing about every 6 weeks with a 9-12-12 and my other plants seem to be doing okay. Can you please help. Do I need to be using miracle grow. The past several years we had a problem with blight but I have treated the garden with a fungacide as recommended by someone. Any advice would be wonderful. Image link:

It's possibly sooty mold which doesn't actually harm the plant except to block photosynthesis by shading the leaf from sunlight. I'm guessing at what it is because it is hard to determine from looking at a picture. Lou

It seems like they could be dying from the bottom up! I've had that happen with many of my cuttings but they only die up to the soil level. If they are dying from the bottom, you could cut them off and re-plant the tops. But it's a tough call because that is risky, and it may not be what is actually happening. Can you post pictures? I just asked someone in another thread how many hours a day you can run a lamp on roses, but without an answer yet I would STRONGLY suggest you put them on a timer to be safe. I do know the vast majority of plants require a daily dark period in order to grow properly. Try 16 hours a day of light, giving them 8 hours of darkness which mimics the longest days of summer. I've seen growers of some types of plants push that even higher - up to 18 or 20 hours - but they always allow some darkness. Maybe lack of a dark period is what's preventing the cuttings from setting properly. Also, make sure the lamp you are using is sold as a light for plants, or is a full-spectrum light as similar as possible to sunlight, rather than an incandescent lamp which is not only hot, but usually tilted towards reddish/yellowish wavelengths which do not give plants what they need. Different wavelengths initiate different processes in a plant and help regulate growth.

There are many very humid areas of the USA where people successfully grow tomatoes. The real issue IMO is how often it rains. If it rains almost every day, it's hard to keep fungicide on the plants. Maybe look into disease-resistant hybrids like Iron Lady, Defiant, Mountain Magic, etc., spray them regularly, and time planting for the driest part of the year? Organic copper is a standby for many organic tomato growers. I find that alternating with Serenade (Bacillus subtilis) works well for me in my garden, but I don't know how it will do in yours. I know a lot of gardeners in humid areas here will also use a very dilute bleach spray to control mold as well. The important thing is to spray before disease arrives. Organic fungicides can do a lot to prevent disease and delay its progress, but they are not systemic so cannot cure anything once the plants are affected. I don't want to encourage you to waste your time and garden space if it really is impossible to grow without cover, though, since I obviously have no first hand experience with growing in your conditions. Perhaps setting up a kind of high tunnel or something or a greenhouse if you can is the best--but even then, you will probably need to use fungicide. Growing under cover eliminates the issue of rain, but disease spores still get into these environments. And no matter where you grow, tomatoes are just a really disease prone crop. It's just that excluding the rain means you don't have to spray as much or as often.