avaldemon
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Joined: Sat Jul 06, 2013 5:00 pm

Tomatoes have little brown spots and other questions.

Hello, gardeners! :)

I'm Roman, from New York, and this is my first year trying to grow tomatoes -- it's not going very well, however.
I have one tomato plant on my deck, in a big container. I have three other plants in my little backyard garden. They keep company to my watermelons there. :)
The one that grows in container has become really big, and started producing flowers (there are five or six bunches now) for about two weeks now, however, they just die. They don't really fall off. The very first flower that opened two weeks ago, or so, is still there...still drying up. Another thing that I have noticed is that my tomato plant in a container has small brown spots
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It has them all over the place, BUT! It is more concentrated in the bottom of the plant. Is it some kind of disease? Blight!!?
Another question I have is about my garden tomato plants. They do not have brown spots. Unfortunately, they are about a third the size of my plant in a container, the one with brown spots, and they have only few flowers each. When I started them they were actually much bigger than my plant in a container. The container plant is actually the youngest. I don't know what is going on. The soil is very rich; I tried digging a hole and there were a lot of fat earthworms in there. Earthworms=healthy soil, right? I bought the best organic soil, compost, organic fertilizer, and I keep fertilizing because we have a lot of rain this season...could it be it? Too much rain? :idea: It just baffles me that the container plant is actually doing much better, growth-wise, anyway. :?:

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rainbowgardener
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Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2009 6:04 pm
Location: TN/GA 7b

I don't know about the brown spots, but I think if it were blight your leaves would be having symptoms as well, brown dried up areas. And the brown stem areas would be bigger and more like lesions. Here's an article about late blight, with pictures:

https://www.longislandhort.cornell.edu/v ... tomato.htm

Re the flowers not setting fruit yet, what has your weather/ temperatures been like lately? Tomatoes have trouble setting fruit when it gets too hot.

Re the stunted ones in your garden, what was your soil like before you started amending? Clay? Sometimes if you dig down into clay soil and then fill the hole up with good soil, the clay hardens and just acts like a bathtub and stuff drowns in there.

Anything else different between the container ones and the garden ones? Soil? Fertility? Sun exposure? Crowding? We've had a lot of rain where I am too, but my tomatoes are growing like crazy. As long as the soil is well draining, the rain is mostly a benefit.

You can check the drainage of your garden soil, by digging a hole a foot deep and filling it with water. The water should be all gone in less than half an hour.



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