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Dealing with Tomato Diseases Part
Over the years, you will find that no how careful you are or how much time you spend in your garden, some of your tomatoes will end up getting a disease where they die off or they don’t produce good fruits. Even when you think you can’t secure your plants this year, at least you can start saving your plants for next year. Posted Tuesday, April 11, 2006  E-mail this page  Printer-friendly page One kind of bacteria that is prevalent is the brown rot; a bacterial wilt that is found throughout most of the country in states southern of Maryland to California. Most likely you won’t realize that you have this sort of bacteria in your garden until your plants begin to wilt and die. It is a slow moving bacterium that may not even affect all of the plants in the garden but could just come in clusters or certain areas.
This brown rot bacterium is called Pseusomonas solanacearum bacteria, quite a fancy name, for a plant disease. Brown rot can live five or six years in your garden, affecting only a few plants, or reaping its havoc on many at any given time. This bacterium begins by working its way through the tomato roots, and then up through the top of the plant. The only way to really beat this disease is to ensure that you take out and destroy any plants that are infected, and by increasing drainage in your garden soil. Rich and organic soil will keep your plants more healthy and resistant to this disease.
Early Blight is a disease that affects states across the country. This is a blight that is born from fungal spores and is spread when the temperatures reach eighty to eighty five degrees. Early blight is where you find dark brown or blackish spots on the lowest leaves of your plants. The spots are round in shape with rings in the center. Early blight is a disease that will kill off the entire plant. One method to prevent early blight in your garden is to keep your garden in the full sun, and to make sure you have wide spaces between your tomatoes so that the spores can’t jump from plant to plant. This is a disease that can live through the winter as long as there is still a host to live off of. Removing plants from the garden and burning diseased plants will help you control blight.
If you have additional problems with disease and your tomato plants, be sure to look for Part II of Dealing with Tomato Diseases. E-mail this page Printer-friendly page
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