Wow Rachel...
I wonder if it would help salvage your babies at this point by completely cutting the bottom out of those pots, clearing out the offending stuff, and planting them somewhere in some good soil, pot and all, ... maybe in some dappled shade?

I too would be very frustrated! Well, I get that way sometimes anyway when I "help" out my plants a little too much, and try to overcorrect a problem...lol

I hope you can save them. Good luck!
Barbara

Rachel,

At this point, unless you want to follow Barbara's suggestion and cut off the bottoms of the buckets, etc., then about the only thing you can do is water your 5-gallon buckets heavily (to the point that water runs freely through the drainage holes), several times a day to try and wash out the gunk left from your home remedy.

There are several issues involved here. First, 5-gallon buckets are too small for indeterminate tomato plants in our climate. There's just not enough space in them for good root growth and they dry out too quickly. Of the 85 or so tomato plants that I planted this spring, about 30 of them are in containers, and 10 of those in are 5-gallon buckets. I normally only put smaller, determinate types or early-season producers in 5-gallon buckets. The smaller determinate types still won't do as well in 5-gallon buckets as they do in the ground, but they'll do reasonably well if properly fed and watered.

The larger indeterminates like the varieties you mentioned above really are not at all happy in 5-gallon containers, and do much better if planted in 10 to 30 gallon containers, and the larger the container, the better they'll perform.

Secondly, Blossom End Rot, while related to calcium deficiency is not purely an issue of there being a lack of calcium in the soil. Rather, BER is a physiological plant problem that results from a complex set of issues related to the availability of calcium and other nutrients in the soil in a usable form and related as well to uneven watering and, often, excess nitrogen. So, even if you have calcium in your potting mix, the plants may not be able to take it up and properly use it if something else is going on. That something else can be in the form of one or more kinds of stress, including too much fertilizer, which causes excess plant growth; uneven delivery of moisture (clearly an issue with plants in 5-gallon buckets in our climate) and even too much wind, which stresses the plants. The way that plants react to so such stresses is that the calcium essentially leaves the fruit and goes into the main part of the plant, since helping the plant is the top priority and the fruit are secondary, and that leaves the fruit deficient in calcium even though the plant itself and the soil may have adequate levels of calcium. So, if you can avoid stressing the plants, you often can avoid BER. Mulching the soil in your containers helps keep the soil from drying out as quickly and might help reduce some of the stress that causes BER too.

Some of the problem may lie in your mix. Other than the calcium that would exist in your compost and manure (and there's no way to know how much calcium was in them) and maybe in the topsoil, you didn't specifically add a calcium source, so it is hard to know if your potting mix has enough calcium in it. It also is hard to know if whatever calcium it might have is in a form the plants can take up and use. Next time, try adding a handful of lime to each container and that should give you plants some calcium.

Third, there's the water issue wich is hard to overcome. You want to keep the soil in your 5-gallon buckets evenly moist, but never sopping wet and never bone dry. I usually water every morning and every night and, on very hot days, sometime between noon and mid-afternoon as well. Even when you water that often, there are periods right after you water that the soil is very wet, and then of course it can get pretty dry pretty quickly in this heat. One way to overcome the watering issue is to hook up a drip irrigation system on a timer, which I haven't yet done this year, since I'm home all day and can stand there with the hose and hand water. It might take a little time and effort to figure out how often to have the drip system to come on, and how long to run it, but once you figured that out, your containers would be low maintenance.

Fourth, make sure you're not overfeeding with nitrogen because if you are, it can interfere with the plants' vascular system taking up and using other nutrients that the plants need.

Fifth, if you need a quick fix for BER, dissolve 1 cup of hydrated lime in 1 gallon of water and feed some of it to each plant. Then, try not to water those containers again until the next day so the plants have time to take up and use the lime.

Sixth, tomato plants that are struggling in containers are often underfed. This occurs because the fairly heavy watering needed to keep their soil moist often leaches out the nutrients they need before they can take them up and use them. You can work around this by feeding them every other day with a water-soluable fertilizer diluted to 1/4 its normal rate. Sometimes they also benefit from a period feeding of Epsom Salts. You mix 1 T. of Epsom Salts with 1 gallon of water in a watering can, stir it up and feed some to each plant. The Epsom Salts give the plants sulfur and magnesium and often greens up and perks up struggling tomato and pepper plants.

I have no idea what the milk might have done to your plants, but at this point, it doesn't sound like it helped them. My big concern is that something in the milk will encourage the growth of harmful bacteria or fungal spores.

Growing in a container is quite different from growing in the ground and plants can go downhill very rapidly if they get too dry even just one time, if they are routinely too dry or starved for nutrition, if they are poorly draining and stay too wet, or if they are struck by disease.

Next year, it probably would help to mix in some form or organic tomato food with the soil in each container. Each year I add Espoma Tomato Tone plant food to each container and also a handful of bone meal and blood meal as well. I do reuse the soil in the containers each year, and just add the plant foods I mentioned above plus some compost and manure to put some nutrition back into the soil to replace what was used up by the plants during the previous season.

If you can't get the pots to drain any better, drill or poke more holes in them. I am concerned that either the rocks or the gunk from the milk or both are blocking your drainage holes. The rocks, by the way, are not necessary at all.

Dawn