Here is a link to a list of RKN varieties that was composed here awhile ago. From that list I have had good luck with Bella Rosa, Better Boy, Jetsetter, Goliath, Park's Whopper, Sweet Million, Super Fantastic, and Champion III. But then I also treat my soil for nematodes with applications of beneficial nems every few years. So many other varieties that are not nem resistant perform well too. Do you plan to treat your soil too?

Dave

What problems did you have that make you think it's RKN?

Recently Skyway 687 became available and many like it. Also an old AAS winner, Celebrity, is worth trying. Those are determinate plants. For Indt varieties check out Better Boy although I am not fond of it. I'm growing Damsel this year which has Late Blight resistance also. Although pink, it is supposedly good flavored. And then for a yellow variety I always grow Lemon Boy. I doubt that you'll want it for sauce.

Actually we are using cherry varieties for sauce as they are so easy to process. Johnny's has many nematode resistant cherry types: Apero, Favorita, Sakura, Pareso. I'm growing all of them. Pareso (grape)might be a little firm skinned, sort of like Grandero, but it produces clusters that you can grab off by the handful. I like it although Favorita is still my favorite cherry. Lots to choose from.

The non-RKN varieties that I have planted are quickly stunted and then dwindle. The roots are heavily knotted. Before I realized that it was RKN, only Big Beef did well in my soil while my usual heirlooms like Carbon failed. The soil is quite sandy.

I planted mustard last winter as a cover crop. I don't know if it helped since I only grew resistant varieties last year.

I'm trying Damsel this year, too.

jx, I am very familiar with RKN. The following treatment for them goes back to WWII and before. Ignore those who say it will attract ants and other bits of nonsense. Are you ready to experiment? Plant several tomato varieties that are not resistant to RKN. As you dig each planting hole stir in two generous handfuls of granulated sugar along with your other amendments. After closing the planting hole lightly scratch several more handfuls of sugar around each tomato plant. Repeat surface sugar treatment around each tomato about every three weeks. If a large area of land is to be treated, dry molasses may be substituted for the granulated sugar, reducing the expense. All in all, an easy process. Try it.

nandina, that is very interesting.

The cost should be much less than anything else used/done for this purpose. Buy a 10 lbs bag of sugar for a few bucks.

I will use sugar just as insurance , as I have no idea whether I have RKN in my new garden or not.

sey

you should give neem oil a try.. it is said to be effective against almost all larvae. it stops the life cycle of them, and on the plus side, it's organic (as long as it's pure neem oil and not loaded with other type of fillers).

i would suggest the Bayer brand. i think most Lowes/Homedepot carry it. you put 1-2 tbsp per gallon of water and drench the soil. it's about 10 bucks and a quart of it goes a long way..

there are studies that show that using neem, not only got rid of the bad, it increased earthworm activity too, pretty shocking. have a read, directly from the US Gov Biotech site: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234645/

it has many other benefits for plants, too..

good luck.

You can also try grafting onto RKN resistant rootstock. That way, you are not limited in what varieties you can grow. There's a learning curve, but I know of quite a few home gardeners who graft their own plants now, and rootstock is becoming increasingly available to home gardeners.

Re: neem, I would be concerned about killing beneficial nematodes. If the neem doesn't also kill all pupating/ground-dwelling pests, it might throw off the ecological balance and result in more pests of other kinds.

Nematodes sound expensive, but when you figure one application done at the right time is all you need for the whole season, possibly multiple seasons, it could well end up being the same as or cheaper than the amounts of neem you'd need to control RKN. Plus, the beneficial nematodes do other things, like prey on larval/pupal flea beetles, cutworms, and other pests that go through a ground-dwelling phase.

I wanted to use them this year for those kinds of pests (as a PA gardener, I don't really worry about RKN), but now my living situation is suddenly up in the air, and I may move during the growing season, so not sure I'm going to invest in a beneficial nematode treatment. The move would be a neutral to positive thing overall if it happens... just not for this year's garden ambitions.

research and use it yourself before you blow it off.. i used it for gnat larvae and it worked very well.. even my soil has tons of earthworms which obviously show that they are not effected by neem as research suggest . again, research shows that it improves earthworm activity, which only amplifies that it is not dangerous to other organisms. neem oil does not kill beneficial or the good nematodes. And in case you didn't know, neem oil is a vegetable, from the seed of a plant/tree, which is an organic compound.. therefor not a harsh synthetic chemical.

plenty of studies done including official ones by the US government biolab which i posted the link above if anyone bothered to read it.

No one is "blowing it off". Merely that it be advocated with care and used appropriately.

Neem has a very well defined role in organic gardening and can be quite beneficial when used appropriately. But it is NOT a magic cure for everything as many claim and it can be used abusively just as any other organic compound can be.

As the article you linked points out, "At present, however, the effects on noninsect pests [and crustaceans] are poorly understood." And yes, healthy garden soil does contain crustaceans.

The article also stresses the use of Neem cake or aqueous solutions rather than Neem OIL so that the oil byproducts are not retained in the soil. And it points out that, "Neem products affect various types of nematodes." [not just RKN].

Dave

I have used Neem oil spray for a long time. Last year I had Bayer brand. I left it behind when I moved. Recently I bough a "Garden Safe" brand. It is 70% Neem and 30% other ingredients.It say that it is 3 in one: Fungicied Insecticide and Miticide. I new all that. I had heard also that it might be effective on some virus.

Now this is very interesting to know about its soil treatment application.

I might have RKN in my sandy soil down here. But being my first season I am not sure. So I will keep in mind.

Great info . Thanks

sey

I've never heard a good explanation for why neem supposedly only kills "bad" organisms. Obviously, neem is not sentient, therefore it's not picking and choosing. And it either has a very broad mechanism of action or it has many different mechanisms that affect a wide variety of insects and other critters as well as fungal organisms. Sure, there will be many that are not affected or that will even benefit from neem. But whether that happens has nothing to do with whether humans classify them as "good" or "bad" bugs/fungi.

It's true that there are studies which show that Steinerma nematodes, among which are several predatory species commonly used beneficially, are not harmed by neem. Which is great. But there's more to nematodes than Steinerma.

As for the effect on Meloidogyne nematodes, among which are the RKNs, yeah, neem seems to harm them. But there's little information on how often neem needs to be applied in the field and in what form or quantities, or whether a drench of an oil solution would even penetrate deep enough into the soil to protect all the roots.

All I'm saying is that, although it may be less damaging that some of the worst synthetic pesticides, neem is a broad-spectrum pesticide, so care and consideration should apply to its use. Like any other decision, it depends on your priorities.

Thanks for all of the suggestions.

I have a small garden, so I only grow a large number of tomato plants for canning on alternate years. This year is a year where I will only have a few plants for fresh eating (gazpacho!) so I'm sticking with one plant each of the two proven varieties and one each of two new varieties; Damsel and Roma VFN.

Next year I'll try some of the nematode resistant varieties offered at Tomato Growers Supply too. I'm kind of intrigued by grafting as well and may practice that over the winter. It would be nice to be able to grow some of the heirlooms again.

My new best friend.

https://humagro.com/promax3

Hey trickyputt - What results have you had with this and what made you use this?

What made me use it was the Thyme oil base. I do not like to use heavy chemistry unless I have to. When I started pulling this summers plantings it was a root knot horror show.

Its a contact killer, a kill it all product, and I tilled it in as deep as possible. Its as sterile as I can get it safely- I hope. Nema slow with the temps so I hope that since they are full tilt in the garden right now I did some massive damage and will finish up when I plant this spring and they come back at me. So the real results come with the crop next summer.

They have a post application product called Zap (and 2 others) that helps re-establish healthy bio post application. Plus I have my own compost.

Its a full blown organic product line that got started in 1973 when owners of a mining company found a seam of Leonardite and went into the organic humic acid business from there.

Here is the catalog on a pdf format:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://humagro.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/HG-catalog-final-WEB-170123.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwjzjJjysLDWAhUBSiYKHRNSAHwQFggoMAE&usg=AFQjCNE0n1zkZl88LCm_E15aEWSAi0-l0w

TIL; Thyme oil is in Listerine.

This is an old thread, but I have to caution about using sugar as an insecticide. OK, it is cheap, and may kill nematodes, but it won't do the plant any good. Plant roots absorb water by osmosis, and they do this by making the ionic concentrations higher in the plant than in the water outside. Saturating the soil with sugar reverses that concentration, and will tend to suck water out of the plant. It's well established that sugar water will kill plants. I suppose if this is done in the fall, such that the sugar has time to degrade and get washed out before spring, it might be of value.

Like the sugar in leaves falling in the fall. Well observed Sir, well observed.

Sugar in leaves falling in the fall? Why would trees want to shed sugar? During the growing season chlorophyll manufactures simple sugars, but the chlorophyll is long gone (senescence, pulling nitrogen containing proteins back into the tree) by the time the leaves drop. The sugars are largely degraded and, in fact, its the degradation of those sugars that accounts for autumn pre-drop leaf color.

No, a scoop of sugar in a hole that you plant in is tremendously sweeter than falling leaves.

Ahh..you are perfectly correct. The sugar of falling leaves is the same as a poem of unfulfilled love. There is to be sure some life left, and to be sure some benefit possible. But one would never consider the leaf loss on a summer split tree the equal of a lady that has endured.

Sure sounds like root knot nematodes.

To daninthedirt...Interesting. You claim that using sugar to control root-knot nematodes...."will kill plants" I have 75 years of plant growing exoerience using sugar and advising the use of sugar to control root-knot nematodes and also those various underground critters that burrow into radishes, etc. I have never lost a plant using sugar in the method I wrote above. Nor have my customers.

The following is a true story. When we retired from the north into the area around the Inner Coastal Waterway of the south I continued my landscaping business, taking only those jobs that were of particular interest. One was a call to landscape a stunning new modern home overlooking the Coastal Waterway. The owner was distraught. He visualized his new home surrounded by a green lawn to compliment the massive Live oaks he had carefully saved during construction. Yet he was unable to grow a lawn despite using every grass growing method known. Testing quickly showed that the sandy soil was seething with root-knot nematodes. My customer, owner of a catering business, had an inexpensive source of sugar. Yes we did! Spread sugar over the entire lawn and repeated four weeks later. The newly seeded grass began to grow....and....grow into a verdant lawn. This was 15 years ago. I still hear from the owner every year raving about his lawn upon which he now spreads dry molasses three times a year.

This nematode controlling sugar method I learned during WWII and those Victory gardening days. I even remember standing in Ruth Stout's garden with my Dad, a horticulturist, while they discussed various ways to control unwanted garden problems and pests, and this was one they both used with success.

End of story.

I said that dumping a scoop of sugar into a planting hole will likely kill the plants. I've seen many science fair experiments where plants were irrigated with sugar water (soda pop), and it never turns out well. Sugar can certainly kill weeds, but it does that in precisely this way. Put it on the weeds. Not on what you're trying to grow.

It's possible that low-level application of sugar could help, if nematodes are the main problem. But in general, sugar isn't good for plants.

Hi Trickyputt, Where can we buy ProMax. I have a terrible problem in Southern Cal with RKN.

800-961-1220

https://humagro.com/contact/

Nandina, how would you describe the amount to be used? Did the yard look like it snowed or could you even tell? Do you get put on a moonshine watchlist buying that much sugar?

Trickyputt...doing a bit of advertising on the side? Hummm. Sugar is too fine a texture to distribute over large areas except by hand. So, it is measured foot steps, tossing sugar as evenly as possible. No, the ground does not appear covered with snow after a sugar application. Dry molasses has more texture and is easier to spread using a hand held grass seed spreader.

Moonshine is now legal. Have you ever paused to read all the creative names the moonshine distillers use to attract attention to their products?

Thank you for the sugar insight. And try as I might, its too difficult to read the moonshine labels upside down. For some reason it gets harder to read the more I try.

I am not paid by anybody to advertise. I did tell the fellow I made the order with how much I believe their product lines are on point though.

Edit: The first year I was gardening I used a lot of molasses. I was into the Espom salts thing too. I guess I have evolved to sulfur at this point but I will say the bacterial and fungal growth I produced that year was stellar! I had fungal hyphae so deep that I could sink a 5 foot rod by hand. It taught me a lot. I was shocked that it would not go 6 inches into my lawn. It also set me on the path of a spray regimen, because the pathogen pressure was so high that year as if it needed any help from me.

So after pulling all my tomato and pepper plants I too discovered it was in fact RKN causing my plants to wilt. Has anybody had any luck with the Pot Poppers they are selling on amazon? I figure one of them can treat the bed I am having issues with. I am also considering a neem bath as some have expressed since it is already winter. maybe neem today and then add the beneficial Nematodes in March/April.

Check out Humagro Promax. Its mainly Thyme Oil

dig dirt, can you let me know what kind of nematode you use? I currently purchased two varieties, S. Feltiae and H. Bacteriophora, but I am having trouble finding any literature on which to use, or if it is safe to use both. Thanks in advance for your help.