Category Archives: Pruning

Are Your Tomato Plant Leaves Showing These Symptoms?

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Photo by jayneandd.
We all want great tomatoes from our tomato plants, but often the plants are hit by diseases or pests and although some fruit develops wouldn’t it be nice to maximize the yield from each plant to get a killer crop, by curing the diseases or getting rid of the pests?

The first thing to do when you notice a not so healthy looking plant is to find out exactly what is going on, so that you can begin you search for the cure. Below is a list of symptoms together with possible causes to get you going on your quest to grow the best possible tomatoes. Try doing a Google image search once you get an idea of what your tomato plants are trying to tell you, and see if it looks like what you’re seeing on your own tomato plant leaves.

Discolored leaves

Yellow

As you can see below, a yellow coloring of your tomato plant leaves can be caused by many different things. The color yellow either covers the entire leaf, is limited to patches or limited to just spots, depending on the cause:

  • A lack of nitrogen affects the lower leaves. It spreads to the upper leaves.
  • A lack of calcium affects the upper leaves
  • A lack of manganese is rare, but will result in dead patches on the leaves, ringed in yellow
  • Wilt diseases can cause a shortage of nutrients, which will then result in a discoloring of leaves
  • Fusarium Wilt affects older leaves
  • Verticillium (Verticillium dahliae)
  • Leaf spots (Early Blight or Target Spot)
  • Root rot
  • Mosaic virus results in mottling
  • Aphids
  • Spider-mites can cause a white-yellow speckling

Light green

  • Too much nitrogen
  • A lack of manganese

White

  • A lack of iron
  • Powdery Mildew results in powdery patches

Black

  • Fusarium Crown Rot

Curling leaves

  • A lack of potassium affects older leaves
  • A lack of iron
  • A lack of copper is rare, but results in blue-green flappy leaves
  • Curly Top virus affects upper leaves and results in a purple-like color

Spots on leaves

Brown

  • Early Blight or Target Spot (Alternaria solani)
  • Late Blight (Phytophthora infestans)

Dark

  • Bacterial Speck (Pseudomonas syringae)
  • Bacterial Spot (Xanthomonas campestris pv vesicatoria)

Purple

  • Late Blight (Phytophthora infestans)
  • Tomato Spotted Wilt/Impatiens Necrotic Spot Tospoviruses

Wilting leaves

  • Fusarium (Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. lycopersici)
  • Fusarium Wilt
  • Fusarium Crown Rot
  • Verticillium (Verticillium dahliae) can result in wilting at midday but recovery at night
  • Bacterial wilt (Ralstonia solanacearum)
  • Root rot
  • Tomato Spotted Wilt/Impatiens Necrotic Spot Tospoviruses (TSWV or INSV)
  • Nematodes causes the plant to wilt prematurely
  • Walnut toxicity if the plants grow near a walnut tree

Drooping leaves

  • Fusarium (Fusarium oxysporum f.sp. lycopersici)
  • Fusarium Wilt
  • Fusarium Crown Rot

Flies on leaves

  • Whitefly (1 mm), more often seen in a greenhouse than out in the open
  • Thrips (1 mm), onion thrips (Thrips tabaci) and flower thrips (Thrips obscuratus)
  • Fruit fly

Removing some of the leaves

If the problem is that you have too many tomato plant leaves then here are some tips on removing some of the leaves to provide the plants with more sunlight and oxygen:

  • Single vine variety: All ‘suckers’ can be removed and staking should first be done after the first flowers appear to create a strong plant.
  • Multi-stemmed variety: All stems should have the same size. Any side stems below the first flower cluster can be removed to create a strong main stem.
  • Determinate variety: ‘Suckers’ below the first flower cluster can be removed.
  • Sterilize knife or scissors between plants, or use your fingers to pinch of unwanted leaves and branches
  • Remove branches during dry days to avoid bacteria getting into the ‘wound’ because of rain
  • Remove sick leaves and branches to reduce spreading of diseases
  • You can reuse any clippings – they will grow into new plants if you stick them into the soil!

Cucumber leaves

I haven’t been able to find any evidence saying that tomato plants can’t rub leaves with cucumbers. I think it’s a myth and more a question about space. Cucumbers grow big leaves, and they could overshadow a tomato plant if the plants were standing close.

While it should be safe to grow cucumbers near tomatoes, there are some plants that are even recommended companion plants for tomatoes, like French marigolds (Tagetes patula), because they deter nematodes. Other plants that act as pest control are:

  • Basil
  • Chives
  • Parsley
  • Onions

Source:

How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes by Lucia Grimmer and Annette Welsford

How to Propagate Strawberries

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If you already have strawberry plants growing in your garden you can make more plants yourself by propagating the old ones. This is preferred over bringing home plants from another garden because you risk bringing home pests with you, like strawberry mites or nematodes.

You can propagate strawberries by dividing old plants or by taking care of the runners sent out by old plants. If you pinch off the flowers of a selected few old plants you’ll encourage more and stronger runners:

With a 10 cm (4 inch) pot buried beneath a runner it will soon send roots into the pot:

Provided with good potting soil the new strawberry plant will be off to a good start and it’ll be easy to replant since the roots will be intact when you remove the pot and replant elsewhere without the pot.

Cut the stem from the mother plant and replant at 40 cm (16 inches) between plants and 75 cm (30 inches) between rows. These new plants will provide you with healthy strawberries for three seasons before the yield drops and the bed should be replanted, preferably with another type of crop to avoid a build-up of diseases.

After each season most of the foliage should be removed to make room for berries next year. In the picture below in the bottom, three plants have been pruned and the original foliage mess is shown to the right:

Light and air can now reach the plants which in return will provide you with plenty of healthy strawberries in the coming season.

Rescuing My Tomato Plants

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When I find these new shoots on my tomato plants I normally pinch them off to force the plant to focus its energy on the developing fruits instead of foliage, but now that all of my plants are affected by blight I suddenly find myself welcoming these new shoots as they provide much needed foliage since the old has been damaged or wilted away:

Luckily it seems that the leaves affected with blight just dries up and breaks off and don’t cause damage to the main stem of the tomato plant:

I removed the affected foliage and tomatoes and the plants are beginning to look healthy again:

Time will tell if they’ll survive long enough to produce mature tomatoes. As you can see in the picture above there are not many leaves left to do the work.

… which is exactly the problem with my broccoli and cauliflowers too – them caterpillars hungry!:

What I should have done was to grow these plants in a tunnel so that the mother of these caterpillars couldn’t have laid her eggs on the plants when they were small.

Oh well – I’m actually proud that the plants grew this big. Besides the damage done by caterpillars the plants look really healthy. Next year I’ll build a tunnel. And oh – we actually did harvest one broccoli, a real nice one too.