Lower tomato leaves suddenly dried out and died.

[Montray Davis]

Thanks you for your help in advance!

Suddenly, I've found that my plant has started to kill off pretty much the entire bottom half of it's leaves, except the suckers located at the base....

Oddly, this seemed to have happened in a matter of days. About three to be exact. They went from very lucsious green, to completely dry brown/yellow within this time frame.

Something I should mention, I do notice that several new tomato branches have also popped up within this same time frame. Looks like it went from about 6-7 to abuout 12. Is this normal? Is it using it's energy from the bottom leaves to supplement the lack of nutrients in the soil? Anything?

I don't get the feeling that it's any sort of disease, as suckers that are lower than the leaves are still very green and show no sign of damage, nor does any of the top. The top six branches look perfect, the bottom 6 look awful.

I've attached some photos, and help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Chuck]

It is a disease called early blight. The proof is in the background pictures

 

[Beth_B]

Yup, it's a common soil-borne fungus that affects nightshade plants in particular, pretty much impossible to eradicate but can be somewhat controlled and it won't totally kill your tomato plants. Actually last year was bad for blight and other too-rainy conditions...but even though by late summer my poor cherry tomatoes were almost completely devoid of leaves they still kept producing like crazy!

 

[Montray Davis]

Eh, I feared that it might be early blight :'(

Definitely a good thing to know though, that it can be managed...

However, do you think it's best to just get rid of the plant, or should I keep it ? I don't want the disease spreading, but, this is also my biggest plant, so that's sort of a bummer.

 

[Beth_B]

Well the affected plant is not the primary vector so I'm not sure removing the plant will do much good, as the fungus is in the soil already.

 

[Montray Davis]

Well the affected plant is not the primary vector so I'm not sure removing the plant will do much good, as the fungus is in the soil already.

Gotcha! Thanks much for the help! I'll just leave things alone and try to keep the soil a bit dryer and leaves away from the soil Thanks a bunch!

 

[cschiavoni]

I had what looked to be early blight on some of my tomatoes (though still not totally sure) and I just removed the affected leaves and stems, washed my hands, carefully applied neem oil to the plant and stopped watering them as much. The plants are now recovered and growing beautifully.

 

[Montray Davis]

I had what looked to be early blight on some of my tomatoes (though still not totally sure) and I just removed the affected leaves and stems, washed my hands, carefully applied neem oil to the plant and stopped watering them as much. The plants are now recovered and growing beautifully.

Thanks so much for the tips! I will try this ! It used to be a really beautiful plant, and, I'd like to get back to that.

 

[gary350]

Spray the plants with rust water. Put several kitchen food can, nails, any metal you can get in a fire but off paint, labels, varnish, then put them in a water bucket. Spray rust water on the plants. Buy Potassium Permanganate on Ebay put 1/2 teaspoon in 2 gallons of water spray it on plants. Put pellet lime, wood ash, baking soda, in the soil around tomato plants. It is much easier to prevent blight that stop it. I have never been able to stop it but I can slow it down. Tomatoes plants and tomatoes both get blight, if you see spots on the tomatoes that is blight. I grandfather use to put a hand full of rusty nails in the soil under the tomato plant every time he planted his plants in the spring. Blight gets in the plant it kills the leaves first then the whole plant.