Dying tomato plant, any thoughts

[Norma]

Greetings all who garden better than I...so everyone. :)

We have a tomato plant that is dying. The leaves and stems are wilting and there are these little nubs all over the bottom part of the plant near the ground. I read something about putting dirt around those because it may be new roots trying to deal with too much water, but it is still looking pitiful. There are a couple of green tomatoes on it. The tomato plant near it is doing great, no issue.
Any ideas?
Thank you,
Norma

[Rob Farkas]

tear it up. dig out the dirt one foot around it and to a depth of about 5 inches. toss that dirt. give the plant a quiet family service, put it in a bag and toss it. grieve and move on.

[Norma]

what happened to it?

[Rob Farkas]

i don't know. but i don't think its worth figuring out, especially if its some disease that's going to reach out in an unkind way to your other babies. could be a fungus it picked up from the soil. always water low, slow and deep so dirt doesn't splash up onto the leaves. once the fruit sets hold back on the water. water deeply once a week, then let the soil dry out before the next watering; otherwise, if you overwater, the tomatoes will get loggy and less flavorful and also be more prone to rot. another trick..you can help fertilize the lil yellow flowers with a toothpick wiggled around their sex organs. the plants definitely like it and you can be like a midwife. its fun and kinda kinky, but not necessary if you see lots of insects buzzing around them.

[Norma]

Thank you. That is very helpful. :) These are my first tomato plants.

[Chad]

It sounds like it might be verticillium or fuscarium wilt. Pull it, burn or toss it (NOT compost it), and grow something other than tomatoes (or other nightshades) in that area for at least the next 5 years.

[Michael Pavlic]

That Just Happend to me. I took some of the lower limbs off the plant and gave it plenty of water and now it is doing just fine.

[Joanne Rigutto]

If it's early or late blight, pulling heavily infected plants, bagging and disposal other than composting (I burn 'em), then spraying with something like a copper spray or possibly NEEM oil for the other plants, should bring the outbreak under control. Trimming infected foaliage on plants with low infection rates is also advised, but you need to disinfect your clippers or scissors between each snip either with a bleach solution or alchohol so you don't spread the fungus to healthy tissues.

[Chad]

If it's late blight, which is the same pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine, you absolutely need to destroy the infected plant(s). There is no treatment for a plant once infected that remains effective.

Worth noting - late blight is rampant in the northeast, and present in Ohio as well. This is the earliest and most widespread it has ever been detected, and we haven't yet gotten to the part of the year when the weather it most easily travels in usually occurs. A single spore can travel up to 30 miles, and the chance of an infected plant in a home garden wiping out multiple farmers' entire crops is very real.

Late blight is the most damaging pathogen of food plants in history. It was brought under control by some fungicides (though it's not a true fungus), but resistant strains began appearing in Mexico a while back. This years' outbreak in the Northeast US has been tracked to tomato plants sold by Lowe's, Home Depot, Wal Mart and K Mart. Cornell did a small sampling of stock at stores once the source was determined and found 100% of the tomato plants in 100% of the stores they checked had the disease.

You can see good pictures of the symptoms, which are quite different from the wilt diseases that are pretty much pervasive around here if you pay attention here.

If you think you've got it, the best way to destroy the plant is to cover it with an upside-down plastic trash bag to keep spores from spreading. Seal it up around the stem, then pull the plant. Then put the bag and the plant inside another bag. Consider leaving the bags out in the sun to roast the spores. Then trash - do not compost!

You should also contact your local extension agent, so they can track the spread, as well as verify that is your disease. This definitely has the potential for significant food-supply impact. Especially since it seems to be beginning to adapt to infecting a couple of weed species. As hard as it is to control when spreading through garden and farm plants, it'll be durn near impossible if it spreads via weeds! Yipe!

[Rob Farkas]

i live in the north country and blight is everywhere. my csa lost the entire tomato crop..hundred of plants. the early potatoes are ok so far. july was wet and cold and no friend to the corn, so that crop is stunted. all the greenn vegs are doing great though.

[Laurl Self]

The nubs are beginning roots and you can add soil or compost to the ground around the plant and those nubs will become more roots for the plant. Wilting as well as curling leaves on my tomatoes usually indicates that they need water. They usually revive in a few hours, sometimes as long as over night, after a good watering. I am located in the deep south with lots of heat, so tomatoes tend toward needing more water, instead of less. Also, check and make sure you don't have a bug sucking the sap from the wilting parts.

[Jan Kelley]

Hi Norma!
First off, the "nubs" are actually beginning roots, just ignore them - they are fine. As for your wilting problem - are the leaves spotted? Is it a gradual change from spotted yellowing leaves to either dried up brown leaves or wet black leaves? this would be blight that you can't get rid of at this stage - but, you could remove all the wilted, yellow leaves as they happen, add some Carnation Instant Milk powder - about a cup or two - work it into the top inch of soil - this may stop the progression and leave you with something to harvest. The main thing is to get air underneath the plant. Good Luck! Jan

[David Jodoin]

Out of curiosity... can you describe how you planted the plants originally?

The reason I ask is that if you did not plant them deep enough to begin with, the plant will have a shallow root structure and be having trouble getting and transmitting enough water to the rest of the plant.

Tomato plants will root all the way up the stem. So when I go to plant mine, I will nip off all the lower branches and bury the plant deep as to cover 2/3rds of the main stem. That way when the plant grows, it generates a deep and wide root structure.

I also don't prune until 8 weeks after Ive planted them so the branches become just slightly stalky. Then when I do prune, I carefully cut the branches off that I want to prune and dip them in rootone and plant them in another bed about 8 inches deep. That gives me a second planting of tomatoes which (in my case) yield a second round of harvests starting around 2-3 weeks after my first crop starts producing.

Not all of the cuttings that I transplant take, in my case I lose 1 of 6. But what I do notice though is that the fruit from those plants are usually bigger and sweeter than their parent plants. I dont know why and Ill leave it up to the xperts to say if that is hogwash or not.

But for me, I think its great. Since I don't start my own tomatoes from seeds, to be able to make 4 plants from one that I buy in the store usually means by harvest I get 5 times as many tomatoes.