Are they in the ground, or are they in pots? That information will help everyone here. It makes a big difference.

My bad...raised beds. Mine aren't looking perfect after all these rains. You know who you need? You need "okiedawn", here on Oklahoma gardenweb. I used to use "miracle gro". I don't use it anymore, but Dawn will explain that.

So true about Dawn. I just post things up here like I'm looking for broad advice from anyone -- but really am waiting for Dawn to solve my problems for me. Works every time.

BTW. I did my other tests for Potash, Nitrogen, and Phosphorus that came with the kit.

Nitrogen looks in the "high" zone, Phosphorus med-high, and potash low-med. This are all color coded, so they are a bit up for guessing, but the little vials are pretty.

I wish I had answers for you, but it can be really hard to fix a soil problem while plants are actively growing. If you have a nutritional issue, those can be fixed sometimes with plants actively grown in the ground, generally by using a water soluble fertilizer (either organic or synthetic, depending on what sort of problem is showing up). pH issues are more of a slower-fix, unless you use sulfur pre-planting during soil prep time, which I sometimes do.

I would like to point out that my natural soil pH before I amend the soil is 8.2 to 8.3 and I am happy if I can even keep it at 7 to 7.5 after copious amounts of amending. The problem is worse in a year when I have to irrigate a lot because our water co-op gets is water from wells and that water tests about as high in pH as my soil. It is less of a problem when rain is watering the garden for me. With soil in that range, I still get tons and tons of tomatoes, so I am not sure how much of your tomato plant problem is related to soil pH. Would your plants and mine be happier in a soil pH of 6.8 to 7.0? Probably, but I don't think having the soil in that range is strictly required either. We have to work with what we've got.

I think it more likely is related to the fact that we have had a lot of wet weather and that it only takes about 15 minutes (or less) of moisture on the leaves to start fungal diseases growing and spreading once the fungi pop up in the garden.

Fungal diseases are running rampant in my garden after the plants had heavy rain, fog, dew, mist, drizzle, etc. wetting their leaves for a good 3 or 4 weeks nonstop. Even though I used a fungicide to slow down the spread of the disease, it didn't slow it down enough. Now spider mites are hitting in incredibly high numbers. They probably are not yet the worst I've ever seen, but they are the worst I've seen this early in the season. Between the spider mites and fungal issues, I would like to throw myself down on the ground, kick and scream and have a good old-fashioned temper tantrum. The change in the once-beautiful tomato plants in just a couple of weeks' time, and especially in the last week, makes me want to cry. But, my rule is that there's no crying in gardening, unless I get bitten by a scorpion or a bumble bee. So, I just try to fight the good fight once fungal issues rear their ugly heads. Honestly, once the fungi arrive in a very wet year, I start hoping and praying the next year will be a drought year so that I don't have to deal with these issues in next year's garden.

Here's the best remedy for fungal infections of tomato plants.

1) Strip off all the infected foliage and dispose of it far away from the garden. Remove as much as you can while still leaving enough foliage to keep the existing fruit from sun-scalding.

2) Spray the plants with the fungicide of your choice, always following label directions. Spray on a 7 to 10 day schedule, alternating the use of at least 2 different fungicides to prevent tolerance/resistant issues from developing. I find Daconil works well overall up to a point, but is most effective if sprayed from the very first day the plants go into the garden. If you wait until disease has developed to start using fungicide, the disease doesn't go away. You don't cure it. You just try to slow down its rate of spread. I like to alternate Daconil with copper because copper is better on slowing the growth of some plant diseases, like Septoria Leaf Spot.

3) Be sure you have mulch everywhere, including in pathways adjacent to the tomato plants, to avoid having soil splash carrying disease microorganisms up onto the plants.

4) Don't handle tomato foliage while it is wet if you can avoid doing so. (When we are perpetually wet like we were for several weeks in May/early June, this rule is impossible to follow because the plants always are wet.

5) Feed the plants well to see if you can force them to put on enough new foliage quickly enough to outgrow the diseases. This can work surprisingly well some years but if spider mites are involved, it doesn't work because they move to the new, fresh leaves very quickly.

6) Be prepared to yank out the plants if they keep going downhill due to disease or persistent pest issues like spider mites. There is a degree of wisdom involved in knowing when the battle you're fighting is worth fighting versus knowing that sometimes it is better to just pull the plants out and put in fresh plants for fall. If you go the route of putting in fresh plants for fall, you can add amendments to the soil before you plant, and then be sure to spray the new plants preventively with a protectant fungicide from Day 1.

7) Sometimes you can prevent some foliar diseases by spraying your plants weekly with compost tea (NOT manure tea) or Garrett Juice. I had a lot of luck with that for several years, but I hate spraying this stuff on plant foliage that is prone to get diseases when wet! It just seems wrong. I haven't used compost tea or Garrett Juice the last few years, but might go back to using them (from day one of planting out) next year to see if they help, or if I was just lucky in the years I did this.

8) Sometimes you can avoid some disease problems by planting varieties developed to have tolerance of/resistance to some of the more common foliar diseases. However, even the handful of varieties that supposedly have Early Blight resistance seem to get it just as bad in my garden as other varieties that have no known resistance, so I am not sure if this really helps if the problem is either Early Blight or Septoria Leaf Spot. It might help if Alternaria canker is a persistent problem in your garden.

9) For better health on the next go round, try using Actinovate or something similar at planting time.

To some extent, I have learned that in wet years, the fungal diseases are just going to show up no matter what I do, so I try not to overreact when it happens. I have noticed it always shows up at the same time the plants are carrying a very heavy load of fruit and feel like, to some degree, the diseases exploit the fact that the tomato plants' focus at that time is on enlarging and ripening fruit, not on fighting diseases. This acceptance means that you are willing to tolerate ugly tomato plans for a few more weeks in order to harvest the fruit already on them, but it also means that you know at some point you will just need to remove those horrible-looking plants and put in new fresh ones. I usually do that at the end of June. Right now, my plants have tons of fruit and if they never set another fruit, I'll be happy with what is already on the plants. I just hope to keep the plants alive long enough for that fruit to mature.

When I remove diseased plants, I don't do it wholesale. I remove the worst-looking ones first as soon as their main harvest period is over, and I leave the best-looking ones. Often, once I remove the worst-looking ones, I can baby along the best-looking ones and sometimes, around mid-July, I notice they are putting out more new foliage and looking better, like they have turned a corner in the disease battle and will recover. That happened last year (when we had 78+" of rain, much or which fell in May, June and earliest July), and those plants set fruit all summer and well into fall.

I am sure you know that it is helpful to grow your tomatoes in a new spot each year where tomatoes weren't grown the year before, but this is not necessarily a practical solution for a home gardener who only had so much space available in the first place. The best thing you can do is amend the soil with lots of compost annually to help the plants be as healthy as possible when diseases do pop up.

Finally, I'd get a real soil test done at OSU before next year rolls around to ensure there is not some sort of nutritional issue, and I'd amend my soil as they recommend. That way you aren't trying to second-guess what is wrong or to add this or add that without knowing for sure that it is needed. Those little soil test kits can give incorrect results. Some brands of them are more accurate than other brands, but I would't trust my garden to one when a real soil test is not very expensive through a lab like OSU's soil lab.

There are no magic solutions when it comes to dealing with tomato foliage diseases. They are rampant, they are worldwide, the fungal ones spread spores through the air, and everyone will have them eventually, though often a new gardener might not have them the first few years because the diseases just haven't found them yet.

I've long wondered if it would be worthwhile to put up a big hoop house with only a roof and no side walls. Open side walls would allow good air flow, and a roof would keep a lot of the moisture off the plants. It is worth pondering, and might be worth doing.

I'm sorry I don't have any short answers or quick fixes on this issue. It is a problem that plagues my garden just as much as it plagues anyone else's garden, and likely it is worse for me than for some folks, because between the spring crops and the fall crops, I literally grow tomatoes in almost 100% of my garden every year, so I couldn't rotate if I wanted to, at least not while I continue to grow 100 plants or more per season. For what it is worth, I am seeing Early Blight on some of the native solanum plants in the pastures, so it is everywhere...not just in your garden or mine.

When all else fails, hope for drought. In a drought year, as long as I water with drip irrigation or soaker hoses, my plants stay relatively disease-free. Moisture on the ground is good, moisture falling from the air and landing on tomato foliage is bad.

Good luck,

Dawn

Thanks for another helpful post. I guess the misery is going around. If I remember right, you are in southern OK, and it looks like there was some heavy rain there yesterday. We got none, I guess that's OK for now.

I bought new soaker hoses to do the garden right. I guess for now, I'll just stick with MiracleGro for now, and not worry about the pH.

I have had the tests done at OSU, a couple times. Probably 3-5 years ago. I don't have them around now, but remember that the bottom line was that the soil was OK, didn't really need much but a good general fertilizer. After that I just forgot about the tests until this year. For the last 2-3 years I've added lots of old compost cow manure cleaned from an old barn/feeding area. It seems to give the tomatoes a fast start, and thick foilage. Then, the rains hit, and that thickness of the foilage might actually make the fungus issues harder to deal with.

We've tried to rotate as best we can, but we have only so many raised areas. I've resigned myself to building a couple more next fall.

We've picked about 6 tomatoes recently, which are just now ready to slice up. Saving for a special deal. Just hoping the blossoms will increase.

I'm in extreme south-central OK, right in the middle between Marietta (to our north) and Thackerville (to our south). Yesterday's rain stayed north of us, but we're getting a little shower now. Our really heavy rain was back around June 2-3, when we got almost 6" at our house. Guess what that heavy rainfall did to tomato plants that I already was struggling to keep half-way free of fungal diseases? Really for the last half of May and first week in June, my tomatoes had rain, fog, mist, drizzle, or heavy, heavy dew on the foliage every single day. I sprayed with fungicide as soon as disease showed up, but wasn't spraying before it showed up. Until the early June rain, I was sort of winning the battle. The diseases seemed like they had stopped progressing and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. I did spray about a day before the June rainfall in an effort to prevent whatever diseases that rain was likely to kick into motion. How'd that work out? Within 2 or 4 days of the rain, my plants looked like they had journeyed to hell and back again.

I was busy with family stuff almost all weekend, so couldn't get the tomato plants sprayed with copper the way I wanted to. Then, I thought maybe I'd do it tonight. Our forecast high was too high for me to spray with copper in the morning hours, so I planned to spray it in the evening after the sun went down. Now that it is raining, I don't know if I'll be able to do that this evening. I might have to wait until tomorrow, and even then I think it won't help enough. I've resigned myself to just continuing to harvest and to preserve tomatoes as quickly as I can, and then it won't hurt so much to yank out 90% of the plants when I declare canning/freezing/dehydrating season to be over, hopefully by the end of June. I already have a handful of purchased replacement tomato plants (they are nowhere near the front garden), some seeds started for fall tomatoes, and some brand new cuttings cut from the healthiest parts of the existing plants, so I'll have plenty of fall replacement plants to put in the ground around late June or earliest July. In a year like that, this is the best I can do with the weather we have and the early onset of both fungal diseases and a huge, early spider mite invasion.

While fungal disease issues that pop up in wet years are frustrating, they also are fairly predictable. When it starts raining, I know exactly what will happen, when it is likely to start and how long I can keep the plants going after that. You just learn to deal with it.

In regards to it being predictable, I stagger my tomato plantings from mid-March to mid-April or even early May in some years, and it always, always, always hits the oldest plants first. It hits them when they are heavily loaded with fruit that is enlarging. Later on it will hit younger plants that were transplanted later, but not until they are larger and carrying a heavy load of fruit. So, right now my worst-looking plants are the 4 small raised beds that were planted first. The plants that were planted about two weeks after those are next worst looking, and then the plants that were planted a week after that bed is starting to look pretty bad. The last two rows that were planted even later still look pretty good. They aren't as large yet and don't have nearly as much fruit on them. It is as if the older plants, heavily loaded with fruit, have no resistance to diseases at that point but the younger plants that still are more actively growing foliage and not yet so focused on fruit seem able to resist or tolerate foliar diseases better.

I do stagger my transplanting of tomato plants for that reason, by the way, having learned that even as I am yanking out the oldest, most tired and most sickly of the plants, stripping them of all remaining fruit and moving on, I still have younger plants coming along and just coming into heavy production. That works out better for me than having the entire planting go downhill at the same time.

Oddly, in last year's incredibly rainy year (24" of rain at our house in May, and tons of local flooding, including in my garden), I sprayed 2 or 3 times with Daconil and the plants pulled through the rainy season, recovered quite a bit, and went on to produce well into August or September. It likely helped that almost no rain fell after the first week of July so that the plants were able to put out new growth and recover. I was sort of shocked by their survival and recovery because I didn't expect them to survive in our rainiest year ever. This year's plants largely look worse than last year's, or at least the older ones do.

To increase your blossom count before it gets too hot for fruit to set, just feed them a Bloom Booster type water-soluble fertilizer and they'll burst into bloom in no time at all. When that happens, if the weather is humid, thump the blossoms or shake the cages to loosen up the pollen and make it move around inside the flower.

I don't have a problem getting fruit. I've got about 60 or 80 large tomatoes lined up on my seed-starting shelf in the spare room, just waiting for them to fully color up so I can use them to make salsa. I should have enough of those fully ripe and ready to use by tomorrow. Then, a bunch more in another day or two, etc. I just have tomato plants use leaves look like crap. They still will produce fruit for quite a while. I just have to be careful, when stripping yucky foliage off the plants, not to remove so much that the existing fruit get sunscald. That's the hardest part. If I removed every sorry-looking leaf on the plants now, my fruit would sunburn and be ruined, so I remove as much as I can without compromising the fruit. Oddly, no matter how much Alternaria canker or Early Blight hits the leaves, I rarely see disease on the fruits themselves, and I'm grateful for that.

Next year I simply must rotate all the tomato plantings to the back garden. I haven't had tomatoes back there in 3 years now, largely because voles tunnel just below the soil surface and travel around eating plant roots. That garden soil is a sandy-silty soil that has been only lightly amended so far. The front garden has many raised beds of highly-amended clay, so I'd rather grow the tomatoes there. I just don't think I can grow tomatoes in the front garden next year because of all the disease this year.

There's worse things than having Early Blight, Septoria Leaf Spot, Alternaria cancer and other diseases show up on tomato plants. My garden hasn't been shredded by big hail, it hasn't been hit by a microburst or a tornado. No trees have fallen on it. No building material torn from our house by strong winds have landed on it. Herbicide drift hasn't hit it hard enough to cause any damage that alarms me. Deer haven't gotten into the garden and eaten it down to the ground. So, all in all, it is not a bad year. It just isn't the year that the tomato plants manage to look pretty all season long. We'll still get tomatoes, but we sure have ugly tomato plants.