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Tomato Herbicide Damage

17 years ago

It would appear that one of my neighbors had sprayed some herbicide recently. I can't tell which one, but some of my plants are showing faint signs of contact with a 2,4-D type herbicide.

My question is, is there anything I can do to help them recover faster or do I have to just wait it out? Any advice / past experience would be much appreciated.

Comments (10)

  • 17 years ago

    You'll have to wait.

  • 17 years ago

    This happens to my plants almost every year. I waited until 2nd week of May this year after my neighbors had their yards sprayed for dandelions (2-4-D). That helped. Last year had some definite curling in the outer plants all but one grew out of it. If you see some big time curling of leaves and bending of the stem I would pull it and plant another plant in its place right now. This plant will be late but it will also produce right into fall. I also plant toms in at least 2 different places in the yard as a back-up. Just did that Sunday, about 2 weeks after the first planting.

  • 17 years ago

    Bumping this up.

  • 17 years ago

    If we have tomato plants with herbicidal damage and they survive, are the tomatoes safe to eat?

  • 17 years ago

    The damage by herbicides now will not effect the fruit safety later, most herbicides are rather short lived and are virtually gone after a rain or two. Your plants should grow out of this damage fairly quickly, here where I live 2-4-d has been banned for usage by everyone except golf courses, makes a weed free lawn more difficult but no more damage to my garden.

  • 17 years ago

    I noticed my thread is coming back to life, so I thought I'd give an update. Just about all of my plants appear to have recovered and are doing fine. Delayed, yes, but flowering and setting fruit nonetheless. The hardest hit of all of my plants were the Big Boys (1 of which I lost completly, the only one I lost), the Mortgage Lifters, and the Cherries. All of the plants that have recovered now how fruit on them, nice looking normal fruit. The Big Boy just has a few fairly small pea-sized fruit, but fruit nonetheless.

    I left them alone for the most part until they started putting on new, healthy growth, and then once they had put out some new suckers, I went and removed all of the wilted, heavily curled growth (a lot of it was dying off anyways). I still get sad looking at them since they are a good 1-2 feet shorter than my other plants, but I'll get fruit from them and they should be a good height before too long.

  • 17 years ago

    Yes, 2,4-D is a synthetic auxin and calcium is an auxin antagonist during cell wall expansion. E.g., see http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/29/7/1165

    Spray with 3 tbs./gal calcium nitrate plus a nonionic surfactant such as Triton X-100, 1 tsp/gal.

  • 17 years ago

    Translation please?

    Yes, 2,4-D is a synthetic auxin and calcium is an auxin antagonist during cell wall expansion. E.g., see http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/29/7/1165

  • 9 years ago

    I think what struwweltper is trying to day is that calcium can mediate 24d damage because it helps it repair itself. This would make sense in my case. I have tomatoes and peppers with 24d damagae. They are now producing fruit (approx three weeks after damage occured) but fruits have blossom end rot-which us caused by calcium Def or underwatering.

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