Thanks Dave and Howel. My father-in-law follows The Garden Master system http://thegardenmaster.com/. I got some hand me down 5 gallon bags from him but they were not holding up well so I bought what I thought were 5 gallon nursery pots on Craig's list. They turned out to be 3 gallon. He feeds his once a month but it is a special concoction he got from the system. I guess his stuff is extra potent and that 2 gallon difference is significant. I will up the foliar feeds to weekly and see if that helps. I was not aware of problems with using granular fertilizer in containers I will definitely look into that. I was leery of using a synthetic fertilizer precisely because I wanted to establish some good bacteria and was afraid synthetics would be a detriment to doing that. The rest of my veg looks good but maybe I will run into similar problems as they mature. Thanks again for the help!

Looks like environmental stress. Ran short of water a while ago. As far as I can tell, only a few bottom leaves are affected whereas the other growth looks excellent. Keep the lower leaves as long as they have some green color as they are contributing to the plant.'s general health.

This looks similar to what I am seeing on my tomato plants. (Here is my post about it.) We did have couple of cold nights here in MA. So may be it was cold winds. My plants are outside for last three weeks though. So they are hardened off ..

I appreciate all the concern! In fact I did test my well water. It came out fine. I live essentially at the top of the watershed for a large portion of the western US. While not immune to problems I would bet my well water is many times cleaner/healthier than what the majority of the US gets in their municipal tap. Keep in mind aruzinsky that a modern water wall is a closed unit and very far underground, pulling water filtered through many layers of rock and sand. It is not a well like Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water! Suzi I also use the potassium chloride instead of salt now. Seems healthier all around. I will add that my poor neglected house plants all look fine and they have been watered solely with the softened water. But perhaps they are more resilient than a little seedling. I agree it is important to figure out what's killing them but mostly for my sanity! I don't have time to waste with entire flats dying for no known reason. The 6 bulb t-5 lamps do generate a fair amount of heat, I am wondering if that could have anything to do with it. I thought tomatoes could take a decent amount of heat though.