Take care with tomato plants

By Rebecca Petersen | The Daily Journal

Published Saturday, July 12, 2008

So how are your tomatoes doing? By now, they should be looking very healthy and beginning to bloom.

If not, why not? There are several problems tomatoes can have and you can prevent most of them.

First of all, you must mulch under tomatoes as many if not most diseases of tomatoes are in the soil. All it takes is a small wound on the plant, a rain drop that splashes soil onto that wound and you have a sick tomato.

One of those diseases is fusarium/verticillium wilt. Leaves on the bottom side of the plant turn yellow and work up, often only on one side of the plant.

The stem turns brown and the plant either becomes stunted or dies.

If you have had that problem, mulch and don't plant tomatoes in the same spot you did last year. If you catch it quickly and pick off the yellow leaves, you may save the plant.

If it dies, immediately pull the plant up and get it out of the garden. Do not compost it.

Early blight also starts at the bottom. Leaves get dark spots and bulls eye looking rings. The leaves eventually fall off.

Older fruit can develop dark leathery sunken spots with rings around them. This usually shows up during wet, warm weather. Again, remove the leaves and hope for the best.

Sun scald is caused by the gardener removing too many leaves from the plant. The fruit actually gets sunburned. It looks like a light spot on one side that gets bigger and grayish white.

If you must prune your tomatoes that much, put a sun shade over the fruit as it ripens.

Blossom-end rot happens when the plants get fluctuating moisture. The uneven water levels can cause a calcium deficiency in the developing fruit even if the calcium level in the soil is OK.

The fruit gets a brown water soaked spot at the blossom end.

The solution to this problem is not to use heavy applications of nitrogen and maintain consistent moisture levels.

Most plants, trees and grasses need an inch of water a week. If you have aphids on your tomatoes, spray the plant with a strong stream of water to blast them off, then set ant traps.

Ants will actually carry aphids to plants and will protect them from predators.

Don't use pesticides as they will kill the good bugs. Lady bugs can eat several hundred apids a day. Toads do a good job of keeping bugs down if you can convince them to stay in the garden.

If you haven't thinned and bagged your apples, get thee to the orchard and get hopping. You need to get the apples protected before the apple maggot moths start laying eggs on them, that enjoy protein in your apples.