Aaarrgh!
This is one of my planted-early tomato plants, exhibiting shriveled leaves and green tomatoes, which, no doubt, will not be able to ripen.
Can’t find any bugs or creepy crawlies. I sure must have done SOMETHING really wrong.
I have three other plants on which I see similar problems beginning. This is the last time I try to grow tomatoes out here!! Last year it was the tomato worm. Bleh!
Hmmm. Maybe too much water. But leave those tomatoes on there — sometimes they WILL ripen. I’m so sorry. Maybe it’s just the blight. Do you have a little ground that you could plant them in (next time, not these particular plants — but it’s not too late to get some more in, unless you’re close to Buffalo), enriched with either commercial fertilizer or well-decomposed compost or mammal poop? Horse or cow poop is great. Somehow it looks like too much water to me. But I’m not the God of Gardening, so I could easily be wrong.
I think you might be right about the overwatering, Ann. I have a place in back where I planted some tomatoes, and the deer or the woodchuck or the squirrels or the racoons nibble on the leaves. And then some of the leaves also have some kind of blight.
That’s why I give up on the tomatoes. It will be cheaper to buy them edibly ripe at the farm stand. I’ll just stick to deer-proof flowers.
I see these are container tomatoes. Do you have a hole in the bottom of the container for drainage? If so, unless you really drenched them constantly it is unlikely to be overwatering – it looks more like underwatering, although that isn’t likely, you’d have noticed and rectified and the plant would have perked up. My guess, it is probably one of the wilts. Did it start from the base of the plant and work its way up, kind of suddenly? Did you use the same soil last year? If not, maybe it is one of those worms that burrows into the plant’s stem (but that’s not likely to infect more than one plant). Last thought, do you have any black walnut trees nearby? Black walnuts produce something toxic, tomatoes cannot be closer than (I think) 75 feet to them. Try deer fence (that soft mesh stuff) around your in-ground veggies – it is cheap, inobtrusive, and easy to install. Don’t throw in the towel…there’s nothing quite as therapeutic as gardening, or as delicious as that first tomato.
Yup, the containers have multiple holes drilled into the bottom. I used all new soil (Miracle Grow). I usually started on one side of the plant and then spread. I just noticed that some bergamot I put in a pot has leaves that are starting to look like the ones on the tomato plants. BTW, the leaves on that plant are totally brown and dry, but one of the tomatoes is getting red. Go figure.
The tomato plants I put into the earth (to which I added compost and manure) are starting to get brown spots too. It’s got to be some sort of bug or fungus around here. So, the deer fence wouldn’t have saved them. But it would have saved other stuff from the squirrels and the groundhog.
I’ll play next year by ear. Maybe it will be worth putting up the deer fence and trying one more time.