It depends on the disease they had and it depends on how persistent it is. About the only thing I ever see on my plants is Early Blight and I don't worry that much about it being in the current year 's mulch since a new layer of mulch goes on top of the ground when new plants are transplanted in the spring .

On the rare occasion that we have a wet summer here in our part of OK, my plants usually will get Septoria Leaf Spot. When that happens (think it last happened in 2009), I will scrape off all the mulch and put it on the compost pile to decompose so that the heat of the compost pile will kill the disease micro organisms. In a normal year when the only real problem was Early Blight, I normally leave all the mulch on top of the ground in the fall, but I remove all the dead plant vegetation and compost it. I usually build huge compost piles on fall using layers of garden debris, chopped-up autumn leaves (we run over the leaves with the mower and it cuts them up into little pieces that we catch in the grass catcher and dump onto the compost pile), and grass clippings. By Spring , we have usable compost.

In an abnormally wet year, if we have had more disease issues than normal, I'll haul the diseased plant debris to a cold compost pile that is about 100 yards from my garden. I never remove that compost, leaving it there after it decomposes in order to (eventually) heal the badly eroded area where that cold compost pile was built.

I almost never see any of the wilt problems here with tomato plants , but if I had a persistent problem with bacterial wilt or fusarium wilt, I'd remove and dispose of the diseased plant debris and the mulch that surrounded it too. I'd also rotate the tomatoes to a different spot every year so those diseases didn't build up in the soil.

If the diseases you had trouble with this year are of a fungal nature, like Alternaria canker or Early Blight, their spores are airborne and soil borne and you never really get rid of them, but you can help control them by getting rid of diseased mulch and debris. Leaving a badly infested area bare the following spring and summer and solarizing it by covering it with plastic for a couple of months can help kill those fungal spores the same way that the heat from a compost pile would kill them.

After the wet year that most of this region had in the summer months, if I'd had diseased tomato plants, I'd remove all the plant debris and mulch this year and compost it . Notice that I don't mention burning it. I choose composting over burning because the composting process returns important nutrients and organic matter to the soil. Also, in our part of Oklahoma, it generally is too dry to safely burn anything. If I had anything to burn here , right now would be the perfect time to do it---while everything remains wet from the recent rainfall and before the first hard freeze turns all the thousands of acres of grassland into dry , crispy fuel. I don't think I've burnt any plant debris since about 2004, but that is mostly because we stay too dry too much of the time. If burning is your preferred option, you can burn the plant debris but most of the diseases are already in the soil anyway, and that 's why solarizing the soil can be helpful.

Dawn

I had my last 2 tomato plants and the rest of the okra pulled to day. I am shredding everything and blowing it back on the garden. I also planted Egyptian walking onion, Elephant garlic, soft neck garlic and 1015y onion seeds. I only have the peppers left and then all my summer crops are gone.

Larry

I always rotate the crops and I always just throw the tomato plants out in the pasture. I really have not studied the diseases enough to know what the problem is. Guess that should be on my agenda.

I like rotating, but my garden is so small it is hard to do properly. If the plants look diseased I drag them to the burn pile. I have also tried burning the mulch a few times, but I had rather not do that. I have a hard time having enough mulch, plus when it is dry enough for the mulch to burn I am afraid of fire hazard, by the time the pastures are wet enough to be safe my mulch is too wet to burn.

Larry