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Gray and Brown Spots on Tomato Leaves

9 years ago


Hi

I am an inexperienced hobby grower who grows tomatoes hydroponically. Until now everything went good. However, after a couple of days of cold and rain, these spots occurred in the leaves and are spreading. They are only on the leaves. What are they, is there a cure or is it the end of my hobby? I welcome any suggestions and comments.


Comments (3)

  • 9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Are you growing outdoors? And did you recently move these plants from indoors to outdoors?

  • 9 years ago

    It exactly happened as you said.

  • 9 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I would guess most of those whitish, papery spots are sunburn. The good news is: since your message was a week ago, by this point, the damage is done, and if your plants have survived, you probably don't need to do anything. The new foliage will be adapted to unprotected exposure to sun and be fine. When it grows in enough so that you think the plant can photosynthesize OK with just the new, undamaged foliage, go ahead and prune off the old, damaged leaves.

    In future (or if you moved your plants back inside after your original post), you need to do what's called "hardening off" when you first bring plants that have been grown indoors to the outdoors. This means very gradually exposing tender, indoor-grown plants to outdoor stresses. UV radiation, especially, will damage plants when first brought outside if care is not taken. Wind is also an issue if combined with UV or with dry air, especially cool, dry air.

    General advice on hardening off is to leave plants in full shade for a day when you first put them out, and then gradually and slowly increase their exposure time to full sun for about a week or so starting with less than an hour (preferably not during the strongest sun period of the day) and increasing a bit every day.

    If you can't be there to move plants back and forth between sun and shade because of work or something, a good strategy is to use shade cloth (a thin fabric that is designed to give plants a small amount of shade in very strong sun areas). In the beginning, use several layers. Each day or two, remove a layer until the plants are doing well in full sun.

    Adjust the schedule to account for cloudy days, etc.

    I'm not sure what the black spots in your first photo are. I would prune off the areas with the dark spots just in case they're some kind of opportunistic disease taking advantage of the sun damage, but I suspect they're some kind of anthocyanin response to the sudden intense UV.

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