Disease in the Vegetable Garden

Wilt infected Black Vernissage tomato plant.

I decided a week ago that wilt was infecting the Green Zebra tomato plant, so I went ahead and ordered Serenade concentrate to treat the garden. It took 5 days for us to get the order because of the weekend, and within that time a dozen tomato plants showed symptoms of the disease.

It just took a day for the disease to destroy Black Vernissage, one of the most vigorous plants in my garden.

The causal agent for wilt can be either bacterial or fungal. It infects the vascular system giving them a wilting thirsty look. By the time the plant starts dying it's too late. Even with the Serenade these plants probably aren't salvageable.

Green Zebra infected by wilt. It'll get dug up once it dries out a little.

I'm starting to suspect that many of the tomato plants were stunted as they tried to fight off the disease. Last year, many of the varieties were twice as large compared to this year. I had applied Serenade early on last year due to tomato speck (bacterial). After which I had no fungal disease in the garden, not even my usual late blight.

Potato plants infected with some kind of disease. After treating this pot of potatoes the stems are now upright.

The garden got treated on Wednesday, but it rained 6 hours later and has rained most of the weekend. Not the most ideal conditions.

So yesterday, I went through the whole garden and removed dying or yellowing branches on plants. Hoping it would give me a better picture as to whether or not the plants are improving. All the large branches on Black Vernissage are showing signs of infection now, the plant will need to be removed or cut back to the two little suckers that aren't showing signs of disease.

Ah well, it could be worse. In other news, Berkley Tie-Dye and Jaune Flamme are ripening so juicy tomatoes are on the horizon.

Trimming Tomato Plants To Get Ahead Of Fungal Disease

Generally, I don't trim my tomato plants except for dead and dying leaves. But it looks like some kind of fungal disease is already showing up in the garden, so I went through and cleared out leaves close to the ground. This'll create some air flow down there where lots of humidity is coming from the soil.

Normally we've only seen late blight in any of our gardens. Late blight is a fungal disease that thrives in cooler weather. As the weather cools in late summer, late blight sets in from the ground up and quickly takes down the tomato plants. All the tomato plants get thrown away at the end of the season to try to control it. Flea beetles do attack the lower leaves on my tomato plants which eventually yellow, so I've always wondered if this allowed an entry point for the infection.

Here's a before picture of the Manyel tomato plant infected with what I initially thought was early blight, which really freaked me out because of the way late blight destroys my plants. I trimmed this plant last and disinfected the shears with bleach and then alcohol afterwards just to be careful.

The greenhouse might have actually promoted the disease since it was very hot and humid in there, and the plants were definitely packed in way too tight so there was no air flow.

A close-up of the infected Manyel tomato plant.

And a picture after the plant got cut back hard. The disease had actually started spreading down the stems, so it needs to be dug up if it shows more signs of it. Afterwards I watered it with one aspirin diluted in water. Supposedly plants produce a similar compound naturally to combat fungal diseases and watering with uncoated aspirin is supposed to stimulate the plant's immune system.

And here's a picture of some interesting bugs I found on the underside of a tomato leaf:

Can you guess what it is? It's the red and white bugs on the left leaf. (The rest is just dirt.)

Here's a close up if you can't already tell.

At first I thought they were just the right size for aphids, but they're red. And I looked it up and there is such a thing as red aphids, they're known as tomato aphids. I had only ever seen green aphids before. And they were just on the underside of this one leaf. And to top it off there happened to be a ladybug on that same plant. Coincidence?