Once the petals have started to die back, my guess is that it's fine as long as you can do it gently enough to avoid damaging the ovary part. A tomato flower is pollinated long before the petals start dying back. I think the worst that can happen is that you might cause some cosmetic zippering if you damage the surface of the ovary area. Better than mold, though. It does sound awfully time consuming and fiddly, though. I have no idea whether doing so will control grey mold issues, though. You'll have to report back to us on that one!

Yeah, as someone who A) gets impatient and B) is bothered by ugliness, I do that A LOT. Almost without exception, the tomatoes grow just fine. So I wouldn't worry about it.

Yeah, I know Dave..... but this isn't for the looks. I guess I was thinking after reading about gray mold and the fact that it likes to form on dead plant debris, that maybe that's where it was kind of accumulating and spreading. I'm not sure where I'm going with this, except that I'm trying to stop the spread. I'm thinking about using the bleach spray as mentioned by Bill over on tomatoville.com.

This is close up of a flower after it sits and gets moldy.

And now some fruit looks like this

Thanks,

Kevin

Please post the bleach spray recipe.

Here's the recipe that Bill uses.

http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=28509

I've used it before with some success, but like he says....you should do it before the foliage disease is well establish or the reaction can damage plants. Also it doesn't work on systemic diseases.

I just used it on my container plants, but then it rained so I'm not sure if it did anything. The bleach did have 4 or so hours to work before the rain hit, so I'll post an update.

Also I might use it on the other grow site of mine. I have an update, but I havent been able to post yet.

Thanks Guys,

Kevin

Thanks Kevin... very interesting.