Start with Google and they're easy to find. Oklahoma State University Fact Sheets on Tomato Disease come up easily if you google those words. Also Google TAMU Tomato Problem Solver. Also, Cornell University VegetableMD. Clemson University has great info on its website and so does NCSU. Every state has an agricultural college and extension service that have extensive online documents to help diagnose plant diseases. I usually find the most helpful info at university/extension websites from states in our region since we share similar growing conditions and diseases. I'll link the first one for you and keep m fingers crossed that it will show up. If Google fails you and you need to find your clippings, Rodney gives extensive instructions on how to recover your clippings in one of those "unhappy with houzz" threads over on the Veggie Forum....if the mods haven't deleted it already. http://aggie-horticulture.tamu.edu/vegetable/problem-solvers/tomato-problem-solver/

Here's another one. It is a key type, where you answer questions and follow the key's direction to the next question to answer. Eventually you end up with an answer. It is from the Univ of Florida.UFL Tomato Scouting Guide/Disease ID

Thanks! I think that was the one I was looking for!

And another one, but it is not diseases. It is about how to identify nutrient deficiency issues.

Amy, I can keep them coming all night until you cry uncle.Tomato Nutrient Deficiency Symptoms

And one final one: TAMU's Guide to Tomato Plants' Twisty, Curly Leaf Issues. Reasons Tomato Leaves Twist or Curl

I am saving them to Evernote now ;)

Here's the link to the OSU Digital Diagnosis page. It has info on some pests and some diseases. Oklahoma State University Digital Diagnosis Page

Here's the link to the UMass page with Nutrient Deficiency symptoms, pests and diseases. UMass Nutrient Deficiencies, Pests, Diseases

Amy, Here's the Univ of Florida disease handbook type document that Helen linked a couple of years ago. It has fabulous photos. Univ of Florida Tomato Disease ID---Lots of Great Photos

LOL, Dawn, thank you. Out of curiosity, do you bookmark your links to your browser or do you have another method of saving them?

I bookmark them to my browser. I've had some things bookmarked so long they likely are antiques and it is a wonder they still work with more modern computer code.

My brain is antique. For the last few days I have wanted to write my email as AOL.com. Haven't been with them for more than a decade! I have bookmarks on the desk top that might go back to AOL days, LOL. I can never find anything though. On my first tablet I used Pinterest, until Flash decided not to update the Palm operating system. Then I switched to pocket. With new tablet, I got an ap which promptly decided to close down, and now I use Evernote. I can search it, and categorize links to more than one category. I hope it doesn't go away, most of my garden info is there.

My brain is an antique too, and my back and knees are getting pretty creaky and antiquey as well. I've never heard of Evernote but it sounds nice. I am hoping everything gets imported here to Houzz/GW that we all had in iVillage/GW and that the clippings resurface (they are working on it) and that they stop truncating posts (I think they are working on that as well).

Amy, You never cried uncle. Do I need to keep posting Tomato Links? I can do it if I have to.

I wish planting season would hurry up and get here before we lose our minds. I saw a tomato plant at Sam's Club yesterday and almost bought it. They had Better Bush tomato plants that were about 18" tall in big pots with little trellises. They were about to bloom. They were $12.99 and I wanted to buy one in the worst possible way. I came thisclose to doing it, but then I walked away. It wasn't because I suddenly came to my senses. It is because the leaves had an issue that could have been any one of several things, and none of them good. I didn't want to bring home a tomato plant with any issue whatsoever, even if it was about 2 days away from blooming. If they have a new shipment of those plants the next time I'm in there and those are healthy, I might not be able to resist getting one. The four significantly smaller tomato plants I bought on Monday have been keeping me busy. I talk to them. I enjoy the smell of tomato foliage. I check them daily for flowers. I check their soil-less mix daily to make sure it is moist. I carry them outside to soak up sunshine all day, and then carry them back into the mudroom at night.

I can't leave them in the greenhouse at night right now because the rhubarb plant out there has developed a spider mite issue. The brugs I overwinter in there always have spider mites despite my attempts to wash them off the leaves before I bring the plants inside in autumn. I'll need to do something to wipe out the spider mites before seedlings get moved from the light shelf to the greenhouse. I've been catching lady bugs when I see them in the garden and carrying them to the greenhouse and putting them on the plants in there. I'm hoping they'll gobble up the spider mites. I do have neem oil and can spray the plants if I have to.

I've got tomato seedlings sprouting and growing on the light shelf indoors, but that doesn't make it any easier to resist the plants I see in the stores. I am so ready to do some actual gardening. Talking about it just isn't the same as doing it. Today I was topping off raised beds with a couple of inches of compost and will continue doing that tomorrow until I run out of compost. The smell of compost and rich humusy earth was so wonderful.

DH brought home a HUGE plant last year, I think it already had fruit on it. I think it was a beefsteak. I hated that plant. Didn't want it to bring some strange critter or disease into the mix, it was too big for me to move and the weather meant it had to be covered every night. It did have bugs, and died of unknown causes after producing some mealy tomatoes. I suspect the stress caused them to be yucky, but the nasty fruit didn't endear this thing to me. I had to try to keep it alive because it was DH's baby, but really I wanted it gone. (Does that make you want to stay away from big plants?)

Oh, UNCLE! Thank you for your help.

Here is a link to evernote. I use the free version. And mine is an android ap. I use it as a data base for bookmarks. You can put photos in it, but if I remember right there is a limit to the amount of data you can store in a month, so most of my notes are just links to the site.

Amy, Well, it is a good thing you cried Uncle because I was contemplating linking some more. Oh, and you are welcome. I have a link for every occasion....and then some.

I don't see you Evernote link. Just an FYI

I usually resist the big plants with fruit already on them, but that one caught me at a weak moment. Luckily it looked diseased and I didn't want to bring home any tomato diseases with it. They'll show up on their own in a few months anyhow.

The four tiny plants that I bought last Monday and potted up into 1-gallon pots are doing well. They have about doubled in size, likely because we had such awesome weather with high temps hitting the upper 70s and lower 80s. One of those four will bloom tomorrow, and another looks about 3 days away. As long as I have a couple of early tomato plants to play with, I should have enough patience to not buy the first decent-looking big one I see at Sam's the next time I'm in there. I've never bought one of those big ones, so I am pretty good about resisting temptation. It is a lot harder to resist the flats of cool-season flowers in the stores now. I am starved for a little color. Well, we have a small amount of color---spring beauties are blooming in the pastures, chickweed is blooming in the garden, and dandelions are blooming in the yard.

I'm pretty sure the link was there. Maybe it's not acceptable? It can be googled. I'm still looking for the best way to save what I want. All methods have pros and cons and I still worry it will all go away.

I am completely overwhelmed with my seeds. Trying to sort them into ones to be winter sown now, ones to be started now, warmer season to be started a bit later, and those to be direct seeded when it IS warm. I just seem to keep rearranging the piles. And then there are the herb and flower seeds from swaps I was in. And where will I put the starts and when will it be warm again and well, I know you all know where I'm at.

Dawn how big are your seedlings when you pot them up? and how big of a pot?

This year I have a lot of flats and soil and really planting a lot of stuff but I am worried I will run out of lights when I pot up.

Of course if my littleman keeps helping me I wont have too much too worry about there, I came home the other night after being gone 2 days and everything was dry except one flat. Picked it up to look closer and it was sticky and moldy.... Apparently he thought that the plants were tired of water and gave them applejuice. I am moving my babies into the spare bedroom asap and then I can lock the door.

kim

Kim, It just depends on what they are. With tomatoes, I usually pot up once they have two true leaves. The size pot depends on how quickly they are growing. I sow all my seeds in 72-cell flats and all the seeds of each variety are in one cell, so they get crowded pretty quickly. If I pot up while they are fairly small, I pot up to 5 oz. paper cups. This year, they were growing too quickly to go to 5 oz----they would have outgrown them in a week or two. So, I potted up to 9 oz. cups that I buy in bulk at CostCo (360 per package). So far this week, I've potted up about 220-230 cups' worth of plants. With tomatoes, I put 2 tomato plants per cup. With flowers and herbs, it varies depending on the plant size and on how quickly or slowly they grow. I'd rather not have to pot up the flowers and herbs again to larger cups, but probably will have to because it looks like the cold weather is just going to hang on and hang on. With tomatoes, I almost always have to pot them up to bigger cups, but I try to avoid doing that until they are in the greenhouse to stay. Once you pot up to 16 or 20 ounce cups, the flats of plants take up tons and tons of space.

Before I started potting up seedlings to grow on in larger containers, I just had 3 flats on one shelf. After spending time potting up this week, 3 of my 5 shelves on the seed-starting light shelf unit are full, so I have to be careful not to sow too many more seeds or I'll run out of space.

The locked door is a really good idea. Young garden helpers are not always as helpful as they're trying to be.

hahaha @ "apple juice" Sorry to laugh at your misfortune, but that was hilarious.

Bon it was hilarious, poor cabbage babies.

Dawn I plant 1 seed per cell in a flat and this year I'm trying to keep like veggies in same flat. last year I mixed and it did not work. some got huge others weren't even germinated. I have 3-4" pots that I will use and then I have 32oz containers if I need to go up really big. I also bought the red plastic cups, i like those the best. Easy to label and I got a case of tinfoil pans to hold them. I have 9 shop lights so far and probably will pick up 2 more just to be safe. The cups do take a lot more room. I will link a picture as soon as I can get phone to cooperate.

The fun really begins when I start hardening them off. I have to wake up 30 min early to get them out before work LOL

kim

I really hate hardening off seedlings.

Hardening off is my least favorite thing. No, wait, potting up is my least favorite thing, but I bring it on myself by continually starting more seeds for a couple of months.

My only real complaint with hardening off is that I often have flats in all different stages of development so that I have to keep track of the flats (I number them) so I know which one is on, let's say, Day 6 of hardening off, versus Day 1 of hardening off. Before we built the greenhouse it was a lot harder. We'd get paged to a bad wildfire and I'd rush off so quickly that all my flats were still sitting outside. If we were gone a long time, I might come home to sunscalded, dead seedlings or to wind-burnt dead seedlings or to frozen, dead seedlings. It just was too time-consuming to carry them all back indoors when I needed to be responding to the fire ASAP, so I had to leave the flats where they were and just hope I'd get home in time. Now, the flats harden off directly outside the greenhouse and I can put up even 20 or 25 flats really quickly if I have to.

Kim, I used to do one seed per cell, but that made me have so many flats that it was ridiculous since I plant such a ridiculous number of plants from seed sown indoors under lights, so I consolidated the seeds so it is one variety per cell. That allows me to start 72 varieties in one flat, which I love. The downside is that once they are big enough to pot up, I simply have to drop everything and do the potting up right then, and potting up 72 varieties with multiple seeds per variety can take hours and hours. I can't wait too long or the plants get all tangled up together.

Yesterday I finished potting up all the tomato plants, artichokes, godetia and a handful of other cool-season flowers. I already have flats of sweet alyssum, violas and dianthus out in the greenhouse where I can just throw row cover over them if the nighttime lows are going to be really, really low. I wouldn't bring them back into the house now unless we were dropping lower than the mid-teens.

Tomorrow I'll be sowing a new round of cool-season flower, veggie and herb seeds in flats indoors, and some warm-season ones as well. While the weather isn't acting like planting time is here, it really is. It's just that most of my planting is happening indoors at the moment. I'm not liking the weekend/early next week forecast very much. Maybe this will be the last time we'll see snow/freezing rain in anyone's forecast here.

The sunshine was pretty today but the wind was so cold. I'm just completely over winter and wish it would go away.

I started, today. Unbelievable how a little (and only a little!) money makes things so much easier. I started them in styrofoam cups and put them in the trays I picked up the garden party long ago. I did not buy enough cups. So off to the store I go this eve. And ain't peat moss seed starter so much lighter? Oh boy.

I rearranged the house. Well, it's really just an old tiny cottage. When Bill got home the coffee pot was out of place. That's serious bidnez right there or sacrilege depending on who's going through caffeine withdrawals.

Dawn what are cool season flowers?

I am new to flowers really last year and I don't know much about any of them except hyacinth the purple and the white which I love. They bloom all summer until they freeze. And last year I received seeds for the most beautiful hibiscus.

kim

Kim, The flower world is just like the veggie world. There are cool-season flowers that have varying degrees of tolerance to cool or cold temperatures and some amount of frosts and there's warm-season flowers that do not tolerate frost or freezing/sub-freezing temperatures at all. Many of the cool-season flowers can be grown, in our climate, from seed sown in fall and winter and they will bloom in late winter through early summer, or late spring if it gets really hot really early. Many of the warm-season flowers need significantly warmer soil, so you don't sow those seeds until around your average last frost date or later. And, for the purpose of this discussion, I'm mostly discussing annuals. Within the perennial and biennial world, there also are cool-season and warm-season plants, based on their basic bloom period, even though they tolerate colder soil temperatures.

An important factor is where you're living and growing. Some flowers that are strictly cool-season annuals for us here in zone 7 in Oklahoma might bloom all summer long in some of the cooler, milder zone 7 areas of New England or the Paciific Northwest. So, the planting and bloom periods I mention here are based on growing these flowers in zone 8 north-central TX and in zone 7 southern Oklahoma.

The cool-season flowers I generally grow include most poppies, larkspur, sweet alyssum, pansies, violas, hollyhocks, petunias, nasturtiums, sweet peas, snapdragons, ornamental cabbage, ornamental kale, lobelia (can bloom a bit into summer if it morning sun with shade rest of the day), bells of Ireland, and cool-season plants from bulbs, corms or tubers like daffodils, Dutch hyacinths and tulips. There are other cool-season flowers besides the ones I listed, included foxglove, English daisies, carnations, delphinium and hellebores (the hellebores are winter bloomers). Some of the cool-season flowers I listed can hold on fairly deeply into summer if it is a rainy, cloudy summer or if they have significantly shading from late morning onward. Included in this group are petunias, nasturtiums and violas. Cool-season flowers that might keep blooming when we are in the 80s will shut down when highs start hitting the 90s. It takes trial and error to see how deeply into summer they will bloom.

The warm-season flowers I most commonly grow are zinnias, salvias, cosmos, cleome, verbena bonariensis, marigolds, echinacea, portulaca, purslane, angelonia, cuphea, nicotiana, datura, brugmansias, Laura Bush petunias (tolerate heat much better than regular horticultural bedding-plant type petunias), celosias, amaranths, sunflowers, tithonia, most annual flowering vines, dahlias, cannas, daylilies, hibiscus, yarrow, gazania, gomphrena, Veronica, penstemon, rudbeckia, scabiosa, agastache, four o'clocks, begonias and impatiens.

Some flowering plants straddle both seasons. Hollyhocks and French hollyhocks fall into this group, and so does balsam if it is in shade. I think my balsam didn't burn up from the heat until August last year. Hollyhocks often sprout from the ground in fall and stay green all winter, or occasionally suffer freeze or frost damage on very cold nights, and enlarge rapidly in spring and bloom in spring and then on into summer as long as you religiously deadhead the flowers. In a milder summer, my hollyhocks might stay in bloom until maybe late June or early July. In a hotter year, they might be done sometime in early June. The French hollyhocks are a little more resilient and often bloom on and off all summer if watered well and deadheaded often. If you fail to deadhead though, they'll go to seed and be done for the year. Calendula, aka pot marigold, will sprout in fairly cool temperatures and start blooming early and will last until the weather gets too hot for them. While nasturtiums often burn up pretty early in the heat here, if we get a lot of spring and summer rain and if I have them in part-shade, they can almost make it through the whole summer. In a hotter, drier year, they burn up in June or early July and just wither away.

Many of the annuals I grow do reseed so have almost become perennials here, except it isn't the same plants growing year in and year out and surviving for years----it is new plants from seed dropped by the prior season's flowers. I will deadhead annuals most of the season, but when we are approaching the time of the year when they are about to cease blooming (or freeze), I stop deadheading early enough to allow them to set seed for the next year.

There are also some cool-season flowering herbs that I plant very early in the gardening season so they will be in bloom for all the little creatures that need their flowers early in the year when there isn't much blooming. Some herbs that bloom really early in my garden are chamomile, lemon balm, catnip and catmint. The latter three will last all summer as long as I deadhead regularly. Chamomile is less heat-tolerant and usually finishes up here sometimes in June.

Hope this helps. I didn't mention many perennials but you generally can determine if they are more of a cool-season or warm-season plant by noting their bloom period in our climate.

Thanks for the lists. That helps me a lot to understand which ones to expect what and when. I am looking forward to trying some new flowers this year.

kim

You're welcome. I really cut back on how many flowers I grow for the last few years---ever since 2011. It's been a drought-survival strategy, and a good one, but I want more flowers....I want them everywhere like I used to have them before 2011. So, this year, I've gone crazy with sowing wildflower seed, broadcasting cool-season seed in the garden, and sowing seeds in flats indoors. Our garden is going to be full of flowers this year.