Tomato Diseases

[Music] joining us is dr. John dama cone professor of plant pathology and we have a nice little laboratory here in the garden this year with all the rain quite a few diseases yeah we do tomatoes are always good for diseases and having a little class on what kind of diseases affect crop so tomatoes are very sensitive both to our environmental type problems chemical problems and also disease you know diseases caused by microorganisms so well hopefully today you can help us learn how to identify some of these and share what to do the first one the damage is way down at the bottom yeah we see that when the when the fruit starts setting in the plants get loaded with fruit they seem to become more susceptible to these foliar diseases and this one here looks like early blight large round brown spots working their way up from the bottom of the plant upwards and we also have this bacterial spot here on another plant that we collected that has these taller smaller spots but they basically all do the same thing they cause these spots in the middles of the leaves and there'll be some on the edges but mostly they're in the middles and they'll eventually cause these leaves to shrivel up and then you lose sun protection later on in the year right now it's not much of an issue because though there's that's very few leaves but if we continue to get rain and it moves up on the plant it'll it'll cause a problem so at this point from a sanitation standpoint should we go ahead and remove the infected leaves yeah people do that gardeners do that I don't know how effective that is it's not used on because really the the dilemma about these diseases is there's an incubation period where it's kind of like catching a cold where the plant became infected like a week or two before you start seeing the symptoms it's kind of like catching a cold somebody gives you the virus and you know you start coughing about a week later so there's always more leaves infected than what's showing so when you pull leaves off you may get them not and then there's some that fall to the ground and they have spores and they move around so do our best to keep it yeah clean and do the other thing you can do is you can spray for it you can use a copper we call them copper fungicides but they're also bactericide so that they're good on on bacterial spot as well as fungal diseases some of them are approved for organic production okay most of the coppers are the same types they're copper salts and they they're all one brand or another is all all the different types of coppers have organic products that are marketed through our Murray I guess yeah that's a great resource to write so you can look it up if you're really stringent about organic okay or if not you can just buy any old copper off the shelf in Walmart or any other store or you can go to farm supply dealers and they have things called Co side a little more active and easier to work with and some of the liquids but okay very good now next to that we have a different problem developing of tomato where we have just one side of the plant yellowing out right turning yellow and you don't see the spots in the middle of the leaves so it looks to me like and then these leaves the older ones that turn yellow dye from the outside in that looks like Fusarium wilt that's why I'm guessing that that's a variety that's not resistant to Fusarium oil many of the varieties that you get seed for or you buy will have an F designation for resistance to Fusarium wilt that's a common soil disease and that'll eventually kill the plant so it's best to treat that through resistant varieties right and you can get resistance in in growth open pollinated types and in hybrids so there it's pretty widely available in a lot of different varieties it doesn't have to limit us too bad no but they're you know if you're if you're a real stickler for heirlooms many of those don't have fusee resistance you got a hunt for that now here we have some similar symptoms of leaf curling but this is one you said is likely not a disease right this is looks to me like and I have it in my garden and I've we have we have had a lot of samples come in through the clinic and also we get digital images sent to us what's wrong with this tomato plant and this looks like physiological leaf roll and it happens when it gets hot and humid mm-hmm when the summer starts and you have a fruit load there's probably six or seven different causes that have been attributed to this so basically that tells you that and they're widely diverse over fertilization under watering over watering excessive top growth bad root growth improper for soil fertility so basically that tells you that the cause is really uncertain but certain varieties get this and they just roll up and they produce normal crops and they don't the only issue is when they when it gets really severe you lose your shade on the fruit right because they're all rolled up sometimes they'll roll up from top to bottom and they won't they won't unroll sometimes it's a temporary thing where if you know you put water on or the weather changes they'll unroll okay but that's what this is and we've seen a lot of it in the state and a lot of people have sent pictures in and samples in this year so another one that's pretty widespread this year is the beet curly top virus and again we have it here yeah this is a good example here of the effects of a virus compared to like a non virus or just a physiological problem with the plant that's causing these leaves to roll you can see how stunted these plants are and they've stopped growing and they've rolled up and they have the purple veins in there that's beet curly top virus it's a real problem in in the western states the other west you go California Utah New Mexico it can be a limiting factor here in Oklahoma it seems to be sporadic problem will have years where you know ten or fifteen percent of the plants will get it and then we'll have other years where we won't see it at all and with this it's a virus so we can't treat it and it's transmitted by an insect that's probably long gone by now right that's exactly right Kim it's transmitted by a leaf hopper and it we don't exactly know when they show up or when they leave but some up a certain percentage of them are carrying the virus it's thought that they pick it up in the desert somewhere on some overwintering plants in the desert they become migratory and they probably don't feed much on these Tomatoes but they just kind of visit it and taste it and see if they like it or not they leave that virus behind so at this point I would just go ahead and remove these practice good sanitation and cut my losses on those those plants are not going to make any tomatoes well this is a good you know year I think to take notes on your tomatoes make notes on which ones are not getting the diseases which ones are seeming to perform well that's true here in Oklahoma I planted three or four different varieties in my garden this year and I've noticed that I have this bacterial spot I have it in all of them I I've been heard that in my garden but I noticed that in like the cherry tomatoes and some of the plum tomatoes I have a lot more of it than I do and the beefsteak type so you know it's it's a good idea to look for that and you know if you've got this Fusarium in your soil definitely you want to make make a note of that notice which cultivars are showing resistance try those again next year right exactly weed out the bad ones hmm thank you so much thank you good to be here today [Music] you

Channel: OklahomaGardening

Views: 839,191

Rating: 4.7831774 out of 5

Keywords: Osu, Oklahoma, Oklahoma state university, extension, research, teaching, agriculture, Oklahoma gardening, kim toscano, 2014

Id: ckb0yZO9VrY

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 21 2014