May 31, 2017

Early Blight on Tomato Plant and Summer Colds

I've had a head cold since the weekend and finally went to the doctor today. After a chest x-ray, it turns out I have pneumonia. The plan is to stay home tomorrow and catch up on some sleep. But first a picture of what may be a tomato plant infected with early blight.
Early blight? At first I thought it was dirt since it was just the top of the plant. Do I need to just dig it up since the growing tips are definitely infected? This Manyel plant seems to be the only one infected. (Sorry, humidity made the lens fog up.)

I'm only familiar with late blight which starts at the bottom of the plants for me and the leaves yellow and die as it finally kills off the plant. Depending on how humid it is, late blight usually clears out my tomato beds by mid-August. Although, the smaller fruited varieties seem unaffected by the disease. Which is fine because we're so hot and humid that the plants fruit early, heat seeming to speed everything up.


6 comments:

Sue Garrett said...

I'd remove the affected leaves to try and keep it on check. Get well soon.

Phuong said...

Hi Sue,
Thank you, it'll be okay with breathing treatments and such. I'll go ahead and give that plant a good trim then, it looks like a few stems are infected all the way through. You have so many lovely flowers in your garden. It looks like it's warming up for you and your vegetables are ramping up their growth.

Margaret said...

Oh, I hope you feel better soon! I'm thinking that this doesn't look like early blight, which generally has dark brown areas with concentric circles inside and these are often surrounded by bright yellow. I have a couple of photos of my experience with it in an old post: https://homegrown-adventuresinmygarden.blogspot.ca/2014/08/tomato-troubles-aka-mid-august-update.html. The thing with tomato diseases is that so many of them look the same, sometimes it's hard to know exactly what you have. I agree with Sue - pick off the affected leaves and see what happens.

Phuong said...

Hi Margaret,
I'm glad you said that because we never get early blight. It might be some other fungal disease though because it's growing through the stem and the plant is definitely stunted on the side where the discoloration is heaviest. It's weird though because it started at the top of the plants instead of older leaves.

David said...

Phuong, I've been very fortunate to not have blight in my garden. Since there are no other gardens around for many blocks, I'm hoping to keep it that way. I sure hope that getting rid of one tomato plant will take care of your problem. My tomato plants are off to a really rough start this year. It was so cold and wet I didn't get them outside until almost June. They were almost 18 inches tall and starting to fall over before I got them in the ground. I broke off the bottom leaves and sang the roots and stem about a foot deep in the ground. The look to be starting to take hold but I seriously doubt that I'll beat my first tomato record of June 21 of last year.

Have a great day in the garden.

Phuong said...

Hi David,
Your tomato plants are nice and big at 18 inches. It's definitely been a weird year with weather keeping people from planting. We were a month late because a really wet spring kept us from tilling. I'm starting to think that the fungus disease might be septoria leaf spot, and it looks another plant of the same variety is infected so the seeds themselves might be contaminated.