Sorry y'all, but it took me forever to figure out how to do a picture. I've let myself become technically impaired. I wanted to say...PLEASE and Thank You, but I was having trouble inserting text.

I don't know how much of this is spider mites, or rust mites, or anthracnose, or blight...but it's affecting all 5 plants in the ground (garden) to one degree or another and I am thinking of just pulling them out. I don't know if they can be saved. Help???

Should I avoid putting any of these container tomatoes anywhere near the garden??? I had thought of putting a couple of extra plants back here, but I'm afraid of the disease/pest jumping onto the new plants.

Thank you!!

Mary

Mary, I am just speechless. Trying to decipher what all is wrong with these plants has me going cross-eyed.

Obviously there's mite damage. If you can see the spider mites on the undersides of the leaves of it you can see slight webbing, then you have spider mites. One way to tell is to hold a sheet of white paper or cardboard beneath the plant and thump a sick leaf. If tiny dots about the size of the dot on the letter "i" fall to the paper and begin moving around, your plants have spider mites. If there is webbing, it is spider mites. If you see spider mite type damage but no spider mites and no webbing, then it could be tomato russet mites. They are so small that it usually takes a magnifying glass that is anywhere from 14X to 18X to see them. Another clue would be that with an advanced infestation of russet mites, you'd see entire limbs, particular those with fruit attached, go bronze....and so would at least some of the fruit. It is possible your plants have russet mites but not so advanced yet that they're bronzing the fruit. Affected fruit would look something like this:

Example of Russet Mite Damage to Branch/Stem & Fruit\

Note that sometimes only some fruit are affected, not all, but if you find any bronzed fruit with attached bronze stems or branches, that's russet mite damage.

Beyond the mites, I think your plants have Early Blight and possibly one of the two forms of powdery mildew. I believe it is the Leveillula taurica one, not the one that is Oidium lycopersicum.

Do you have healthy green foliage at the top of these plants and, if so how much? A small amount? A lot?

If these were my plants, I'd probably yank them out. However, whether you will chose to do that is a decision only you can make. We've already overdosed on tomatoes, so I can be pretty cavalier about yanking out a plant. If you haven't had a ton of tomatoes yet, I certainly wouldn't blame you for wanting to help these plants limp along until they can ripen their fruit.

If these were my plants and I had decided that in lieu of yanking them, I wanted to make a big last-ditch effort to save them, I'd remove all the diseased and mite-infested foliage, put it in trash bags and dispose of it with the household garbage. Then I would look at how much foliage and fruit is left and, if there's not enough foliage to shade the fruit, I might yank the plants, or I might decide to put up bed sheets or shade cloth over them to protect the fruit until more foliage grows. Then I'd spray the plants with neem oil on a day when the high temperature was going to be 90 degrees or less, and I'd spray in the evening after there is no direct sunlight hitting the plants. Neem gives you the best bang for the buck because it can fight some diseases and some pests. I'd wait two days and then release ladybugs onto the plants in the hope they'd devour the mites. Do I think all this would be successful? That depends on how much healthy foliage is left. Usually once a plant has a heavy infestation of spider mites, it can survive and rebound if you make it through July. Down here, the mite damage usually peaks around mid-July and then by the end of July or early August, you will see plants bouncing back (if they survived the mites, which doesn't always happen).

Now, here's the caution on removing damaged foliage---if you have spider mites or russet mites, you probably have 1 or more species of predatory mites trying to eat and destroy the pest mites even though you don't know they are there. Spraying will kill your predatory mites and, since predatory mites are slower to bounce back than pest mites, your spider mite infestation can rapidly worsen. (This is a phenomenon commonly observed after using a broad-spectrum pesticide to attempt to control spider mites.) And, of course, once your plants have powdery mildew, you cannot cure them. All you can do is work (and it is hard work) to spray, spray, spray and prevent the PM from spreading quickly enough to kill the plant before your fruit can ripen. Hence.....

I've circled back around to my initial statement that if they were my plants, I'd yank them.

Sorry. I didn't even mention some brown circles and some foliage discoloration that also might be the early stages of Early Blight.

These plants are in trouble.

I would be careful about putting the new plants too close to where the old ones are. I do think residual pests and diseases might find them. On the other hand, pests and diseases often strike stressed plants, and new plants are less stressed (cause they are young and beautiful and healthy) so might be able to fend them off. With the new plants, I'd use a fungicide from Day 1. For organics, you can use copper or Serenade. For a synthetic, there's good old Chlorothalonil. For PM, spraying with milk often helps, but more as a preventive than a cure. If lady bugs aren't all over your garden, I'd buy and release some near the new plants. In fact, I'd mix up some wheast and smear it on stakes right beside each new plant in order to attract the lady bugs there. My hope would be that they feed on the wheast (newly released lady bugs often fly away the first day or first night) and then move over to the tomato plants and work on keeping your new autumn tomato plants healthy. I do think that tomato russet mites can drop to the soil and survive a couple of weeks, but I'm not positive about that. So, with the soil, I'd drench it with something (don't ask me what, because I'm still thinking about it....maybe Garrett Juice or maybe a water/orange oil mix or maybe neem oil/water or maybe a Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap/Water mix)....my goal would be to drench the soil with something that might coat and kill the mites in the soil, making it safe to come back and plant something there a few days later.

On some of those leaves that have the mottling that looks like spider mite damage, is all of that damage to the leaves itself? Or, is some of it some little grains that look like sugar? If there's little grains like sugar, your plants might have psyllids.

Other than all the above, the plants look great. Hey, at least they are producing green things that will turn into ripe tomatoes if the plants live long enough.

I don't know what the heck happened to these plants to cause all these issues to be present all at the same time, but I suspect we could blame almost all of it on the weather this year. Everything wrong this year is occurring because of the weather. Everything. It certainly isn't your fault or mine or Amy's or Jerry's or anyone else's.....it is Mr. or Ms. Weather. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Dawn

Dawn....LOL I think I will probably just yank and bag them!!! You know what? I think I've created a bad situation in the garden by not rotating tomato plants. If I want to can, I have to plant plenty of tomatoes, but that leaves me no option to rotate. So, tomatoes end up planted where they were planted the year before, and the year before that, etc. I think that I need to give the garden a tomato rest.

Having said that, I've got one new tomato in a fabric pot situated on the back patio, right next to the garden. I doubt I can move it, but I may get a neighbor to try and help me. The new tomatoes are on the south side of the house, vs. the garden which is on the north side of the house.

I went to Lowes and bought some copper fungicide and some GardenSafe Fungicide 3, which is a fungicide, miticide, and insecticide (I think it's just Neem oil). I will spray all the new plants. I just want to have some tomatoes!!

Thanks, Dawn. I don't know what we would do without you. You are my Rodale and Jeavon wrapped into one!!! :)

Dawn, I had to come back and re-read to soak it all in. I pulled two of the plants (one was loaded with green tomatoes, and I hated to do that), and I am going to pull another one. I have a Cherokee Carbon that has some large green fruit on it, and I'd like to get some of those tomatoes. It has the same issues, but not as advanced. Once they are all pulled, that's it until/unless the fall tomatoes produce. I have applied copper fungicide and that 3 in 1 neem concoction to all the fall tomatoes. I have four of them in their containers, and I am shading them in the afternoon with old curtain sheers...they all are looking fine.

I built two more cages today, and mixed up enough container mix for 2 20 gal containers. I'm going to give my ex son-in-law's mother my spares. She loves to grow tomatoes and she was up for trying a fall crop. I'm also gonna give her broccoli, cauliflower, chinese cabbage, etc. I don't need 12-13 tomato plants, and I don't need so many of the cole crops.

I think I will try some sort of soil drench where the tomatoes have been (one of the recipes you mentioned). It's funny: It doesn't appear that I have any mite damage on anything else. The peppers planted right next to them are just fine. The peas are fine, the beans were getting nibbled on by something, but I weed whacked them down and that's gonna get tilled in so I plant some of my fall stuff (not my new tomatoes!!!) I had something nibbling on the cucumbers, but I sprayed them and we'll see if whatever it is goes away. It's nothing too bad. I've got something going on with the zucchini, and they are probably just stressed. I didn't lay soaker hoses for them this year. It was all I could do just to get them in the ground. I haven't taken care of them (or the garden as a whole) as I should. I've gotten a lot of zucchini, but I've been hand-pollinating. Had a big rush of fruit, and then now it seems to be all male flowers again.

Oh well...here's hoping for good fall tomatoes for everyone doing them this year.

Mary, It is incredible that you have a garden at all considering all the health issues you've had. Don't worry too much about not being able to maintain it as usual---some years are just that way and for you this is one of those years.

Squash often does that when stressed, so hopefully keeping it watered will spur the formation of new female flowers so that the males can serve their appointed purpose.

I really do like Cherokee Carbon. It produced early, often and heavily and has stayed pretty healthy. I didn't really expect to like it because most of the time when the breeders breed a hybrid using one or more heirlooms, the hybrid isn't worth growing. With the Cherokee Carbon though, I feel like they hit it out of the ballpark. (Brandy Boy is another example of a breeding program that produced a decent hybrid from an heirloom parent.,but there's not many success stories.) I might order seeds of the other heirloom crosses from the same Heirloom Marriage line as Cherokee Carbon and see how they do next year.)

Spider mites have been odd in my garden this year. They have come and gone and remain present, but I must have beneficials controlling them fairly well because (so far) their population hasn't skyrocketed to huge levels or caused much actual damage yet. Of course, we have another few weeks of brutally hot weather and sometimes their population just goes crazy in brutally hot weather, so it probably is too soon for me to feel like the score is Garden 1 Spider Mites 0, though maybe it will end up that way.

Most plants in my garden are being devoured by some leaf-eating pests. I don't think I have a huge population of any given pest, but just some of everything....caterpillars and grasshoppers in particular lately. I'm just not going to worry about it. It is too hot to get too wound up over things. A friend of ours worked outside in his yard today and suffered from heat exhaustion. Now, see there...his problem is that he was outdoors trying to get stuff done. If he'd been chilling indoors doing nothing useful like Tim and I were, he wouldn't be feeling so sick now. Bless his heart. I hope he feels better soon. He's a good guy and I feel bad that he got heat exhaustion. I try to avoid that myself. Been there. Done that. Don't want to do it ever again.

Dawn