Aphids can do that but you'd see the aphids. Bean rust also has a similar pattern but that is the wrong color and there is no sign of the spores either. I'd be inclined to just call it environmental damage from sun scald and wind burn. Especially if it is just the older leaves as in the pic and not the new growth. Dave

Wow. You are so right. I just read about how it spreads...twigs, leaves and fruit. You just have to get rid of the affected leaves that fall on the soil. What was I thinking? You don't throw away the soil from a plant that gets mold or mildew....just the leaves. Thanks for the heads up. "The bacterium Xanthomonas pruni overwinters in twigs that are infected late in the season about the time leaves are shed. The following spring, when environmental conditions are favorable, bacteria ooze out onto the surface of these twigs. The bacteria are then spread by windblown or splashing rain and can result in new infections throughout the growing season. The bacteria come in contact with healthy leaves, fruit and current-year twigs and enter the tissues through stomata or lenticels when surface moisture is present. Once inside healthy tissues, the bacteria multiply and disease develops. Warm temperatures (70-85 degrees F, 2l-29 degrees C) with light rains, heavy dews or fogs and windy weather are most conducive for disease development and spread. The disease makes little progress when weather is hot and dry."

Debra, If you're concerned about disease, bookmark the linked website so you can look at it any time you see a suspicious 'spot' on your tomato plant foliage or stems or fruit. I'll warn you though that diseases on plants can appear quite different from the photos on websites. About the only diseases I would be concerned about would be Septoria Leaf Spot, Bacterial Speck, Bacterial Spot or Early Blight. Even when I see them, I just try to remove damaged, diseased leaves and avoid spraying unless I think a plant is about to die. If Late Blight were common here in our state, I might get concerned about it, but it generally develops at temps between 50 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit and those temperatures are long, long, long gone here. Diseases are not as common as people think. In roughly 25 years of growing tomatoes on my own, I have seen Tomato Spotted Wilt exactly once, Southern Blight exactly once, Septoria Leaf Spot about once every 3 or 4 years (last year it was extremely bad, but I got tons of fruit anyway), Bacterial Speck or Bacterial Spot only in the rainiest springs, and Bacterial Wilt once in recently memory, and probably lost a couple of plants to it in the early 2000s, but didn't do the cut stem/water test to confirm it. Early Blight is so common that I expect it. I remove diseased foliage and don't worry about it. My plants will produce well despite it. If I wanted to carry over the plants into fall, I might spray Daconil as a preventive, but instead I just start over with fresh, new plants for fall. For me, fresh new plants for fall give better yields than old tired spring plants carried over into fall. If I let myself get excited about every spot or speckle on my tomato leaves, I wouldn't have time or energy for anything else. Despite how obsessed I am with growing tomatoes, I don't let myself get wound up over whatever is happening on the plants. Well, except maybe the stinkbugs. They'll ruin your fruit and nothing controls them. I saw one this morning when I was working in the garden and I reached out and cut it in half with my scissors. (That's my favorite method of bug control. Quick. Easy. Non-toxic, unless you're the affected bug.) When stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs show up, I don't freak out, but I do put on my mental armor and adopt a "me vs. them" kind of philosophy. In southern parts of Texas, they're so prolific that you might as well just pull up your plants and give up when they show up. If I gardened in southern Texas, I'd have to raise my plants in a screenhouse (which, naturally, my loving DH would build for me with a minimal amount of grumbling. OK, so he would grumble, but he'd do it.) Here, I just try to kill 'em whenever I see them. I'd rather have 18 diseases on one tomato plant than one stinkbug. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: TAMU Tomato Problem Solver

The bacterium that causes Bacterial Speck with tomatoes is not the same as the one that infects peppers, so no problem there. For next year I suggest you do a few things. First, you can turn over the soil where you have your tomatoes and with a shovel, not with a rototiller, and that buries the bacteria and spores that fall to the ground from infected plants. When buried deeply they can't do damage. If not buried deeply then your plants can get what's called Splashback reinfection from rain or irrigation splashing the spores and bacteria back onto the plant. One thing that helps is to mulch the plants to prevent splashback. All NEW infections are aquired via wind and rain, so as soon as you set the plants out you need to start on a regular vigorous spray schedule. There's no knowing what might hit your plants next year so if it were me I'd start with the anti-fungal Daconil first. If you start seeing any evidence of bacterial foliage infections then add something copper to your spray schedule. But don't mix the two together since that dilutes the number of molecules in the Daconil that attach to the specific receptor sites on the upper leaf surface and prevents attachment of those fungal pathogens. And with dilution not allthosesites will be covered. Is protection total? No, no product is 100% effective, but some of them do help. I can think of very few folks who have NEVER had tomato plants with foliage diseases so what you're experiencing is experienced by millions of backyard tomato growers. As for your seed sources, I'm a long time Life Time member of SSE and I happen to think that the prices asked for in the Public catalog are way too high. Just my opinion. And personally I gave up on Burpee many many years ago for several reasons. There are some terrific seed sites, many of them family owned, that offer LOTS of varieties for a more decent price, again, IMO. and in these economic times I think they deserve our support b'c it's they, who help preserve varieties, by offering them. And there are many threads here at GW whiich list what some of those sites are. I'll mention just a few where I know the owners well and trust what they do: Sandhill Presrvation Tomato Growers Supply ( also hybrids) Gleckler Seedmen Victory Seeds Heritage Seeds in CA Heirloom Seeds in PA Tania at her website sells seeds for about 600 varieties and also has a superb website with pages for over 3,000 varieties, with comments from others, pictures and seed sources for the varieties where known, and I'll link to it below if you don't know about it. It looks like her site is down right now but hopefully that's temporary associated with weather in British Columbia Casey's Heirloom tomatoes of Airdrie, Canada Well those are a few and no doubt I've left off some sites, but the above are ones that I sent seeds for new varieties for trial each year, with few exceptions, so I do know them well and trust all of those sites and there are some sites I cannot suggest at all. Carolyn