Tomato Pests & Diseases and How to Fix Them With Organic Solutions

spring is sailing along smoothly in the vegetable garden you're watching all of your tomatoes grow you're dreaming about that tomato sandwich and all the tomatoes you're going to have for canning and freezing in the winter and then the reality of gardening sets in now there's no season that doesn't come with disappointment and most of that disappointment is usually pests and diseases and in this episode we're going to talk about the main pests and diseases that will attack your tomatoes and what you can do to prevent them and to take care of them once they've already happened it's tomato tuesday i'm brian with california garden tv and if you're looking to join an online garden community that offers tips tricks and support to help you grow your own organic fruits and vegetables and tomatoes you're in the right place start now by clicking subscribe and hitting the bell icon so you get notified every time we upload a video now let's get growing so before we get into individual pests and diseases just know that overall pests and disease typically attack plants that are already unhealthy or showing signs of stress and so our main goal first and foremost is to make sure that all of our plants are at their healthiest now if you haven't watched last tomato tuesday's video on bricks definitely watch that but basically the higher the bricks value of the plant the higher the sugar content and it's thought that pests can't metabolize sugar and so they skip those plants and go to the ones with the lower brix content so again if you haven't watched that go back and watch it now i'll link it down below okay let's get right into it we're going to start with diseases and the first couple i'm going to talk about are black spot and blight now black spot is going to look like little black spots surrounded by yellow blight is going to be more of like a it's just going to look like the plant is kind of wilting turning colors and dying and both of those are fungal diseases and both of those can be handled in pretty much the same way now i'm always going through the garden looking for diseased or dead leaves and especially on tomatoes you want to start removing those as soon as you see anything wrong like i said they're going to be on the lower leaves and take them all off if they have a problem because there's enough leaves at the top and continually replacing to make sure the plant has enough to photosynthesize um usually by the middle of june the bottom two feet of my tomato plants are completely naked so that's just the way it happens and that's on uh indeterminate plants not determinate and we'll be getting into all this a little more detail on the let's see next tuesday or the one after i'm not real sure but the one about pruning we're gonna be talking about all of that now when you talk about fungal diseases most of them are caused uh by water splashing onto the ground and then up to the leaves and so we want to make sure that first of all the leaves are always as much as possible dry but there are thousands if not millions of fungal spores laying on the surface and right in the top layer of your soil and so when the water splashes on the soil and then splashes up onto the leaves it takes those fungal spores and lets them jump up to the leaves where they can start to spread and so number one what you want to do is lay down a layer of mulch a couple inches and what that will do is put a physical barrier between the soil and the pathogens and your plant another thing is avoid splashback and that can be done by drip irrigation is the best way but if you're gonna water make sure the hose or whatever you're using is right on the ground and there's no splash back now when i mentioned this last year on the tomato video i had a lot of questions about rain and you know how do we keep the the plants from rain if we can't let them get wet well we can only do our best and obviously unless you're growing in a greenhouse or indoors there's not a lot you can do and so we have to control it where we can so no spraying the leaves no overhead sprinklers the only time you're going to want to get the leaves wet is when you're spraying and it's a situation kind of like you know when you take prescription drugs you got to weigh the benefits and the risk the benefits of spraying far outweigh the risks of not spraying especially in a wet climate so if you live in a wet summer climate or even if you don't and you just want an extra layer of protection there's a spray mixture that i have been using that is a mixture of aspirin and baking soda so here's how to mix it and why it works we're gonna put two tablespoons of baking soda in a gallon of water in a sprayer and baking soda raises the ph level on the leaf that creates an environment that can't support the fungus and we're also going to put in 600 milligrams of aspirin uncoated if possible and only uncoated because i had a lot of questions about this the coating on the aspirin when you grind it up in the water it has a tendency to clog your sprayer so that's why it's uncoated and i know it's hard to find so i will leave a link down below to the ones that i use so we're gonna put 600 milligrams of the aspirin and we're going to crush it up in like a blender with some water when tomatoes are under attack by pests and disease they produce a hormone that is similar to the salicylic acid in aspirin this hormone triggers the plant's immune system because it thinks it's under attack which makes its immune systems go into overdrive before there's any disease present this makes it much more difficult to the disease to take hold in the first place so with these two ingredients in the gallon sprayer we're going to spray the leaves top and bottom of the leaves every one to two weeks if you live in a wetter climate uh every every week in not so wet climate every two weeks spraying in the morning is better or in the evening but not in midday morning is by far the best you can also add a table or an ounce of the tomato and veg from neptune's harvest and get your foliar feeding all done just all in the same the same time but that's only every two weeks so if you're spraying that that mixture every week then it would be every other time that you would add the tomato veg formula okay so that mixture is a preventative but if you didn't spray that mixture and you didn't prevent it and it shows up there's something that you already have in your medicine cabinet that can help you deal with that and that is hydrogen peroxide now hydrogen peroxide technically is not organic but a lot of organic people use it including myself um you just do the research and if you're comfortable for your family use it you want to mix 10 tablespoons of the hydrogen peroxide and this is a 3 hydrogen peroxide a table 10 tablespoons per gallon of water in a sprayer and again you're going to spray the leaves top and bottom very heavily and you're going to give it 24 hours to kill the fungus then after that 24 hours mix up the other spray we just talked about with the aspirin and baking soda and start to use that then every week or two as a preventative if it comes back go back to the baking soda wait 24 hours and then start the mixture again now another disease your tomatoes might get is powdery mildew powdery mildew thrives in warm humid climates it starts as little white spores usually on the lower leaves of the plant that spread over the entire plant if left untreated the spores cover the leaves and inhibit photosynthesis and the leaves yellow and drop off in turn flowering and fruiting can slow or stop now it can be prevented i'm not sure if it can be prevented a hundred percent organically but there are things that you can do first of all just like before you want to keep the air flow in the plant and that's why we prune so when we get to our pruning video and it's time for that i'll explain that all in detail but you just want to keep the airflow moving you want to space your plants properly which we went into in our planting video a couple weeks ago keep the leaves dry again and then if you do get it which you probably will there is something that you can use i've used it for years and it is very effective and that is neem oil now neem oil comes from the seeds of the neem tree so it is organic it is considered organic but it can stop powdery mildew in its tracks within 24 hours so you want to mix it according to the bottles directions and i've got the brand i use down below and then again spray it very heavily top and bottom of the leaves now if you need something right now and you don't have a couple days to wait for amazon to get the neem oil to you you can try milk milk interacts with the sun and it creates free radicals on the surface of the leaves that kill the mildew spores it's four parts milk to six parts water and spray that every couple weeks so those are the main diseases that tomatoes get there are a couple other things that i'm not sure if they're actually diseases but i'm including them here anyway uh the one of those is blossom end rot if you've ever grown your tomatoes they're starting to mature and they start to look like this that's blossom end rot and there's a couple reasons for that or a couple possible reasons number one would be lack of calcium in the soil that's usually not the main reason the main reason is usually a lack of calcium uptake into the plant and that can be caused by a couple different things number one not enough microbes in the soil to be able to help the plant bring the calcium into the root system and into the into the plant itself or the second one would be a lack of water and so when there's a lack of water calcium is delivered into the plant by water so if you're not watering the plant enough it's not being able to take up enough water therefore it's not being able to pull in enough calcium and then you're going to get blossom end rot so water regularly fertilize regularly with the um the neptune's harvest tomato and veg this has calcium in it it also has humates which increase the microbes in the soil so doing those things are gonna prevent the blossom end rot now if you do get it and it's it's bad and you need to a quick fix you can actually take a handful of gypsum sprinkle it around the roots and then water it in and that's going to give it a quick shot of calcium now it's not going to fix the fruit that's already damaged but it will hopefully help the ones coming on after that now fruit cracking is another annoying issue maybe not categorized as the disease but it is unsightly tomatoes that crack are edible still but you want to cut away the cracks which will inevit inevitably mold but you still can't eat the rest of the fruit it's not as uh appealing to the eye it's certainly not going to be aesthetically pleasing to friends and neighbors who you have been talking about all all summer showing on instagram and here you're going to show up with cracked fruit so it's still edible but let's prevent it and the way to do that it will first know the cause when a tomato is has a lack of water it pushes the pause button on getting the fruit larger and then when you all of a sudden water it it pushes the fast forward button and you the tomato soaks in all that water and grows way too fast for the skin to keep up with and you're gonna get cracking so consistent water again if you can do a drip system or something on a timer or set a phone timer to remind you that's going to help a lot okay so i think i've covered all the main tomato diseases now on to pests yay this is a dark video that's okay because we have ways to fix them all so let's just move forward if you're getting something out of this video if you could do me a favor and click the thumbs up button that would actually help push this video out to more gardeners and get the word out i'd appreciate it and hopefully they would too and if you have any questions or remedies that you've used that work leave those in the comments okay so the number one tomato pest that everybody thinks of is the tomato hornworm so ugly and scary not as bad as a potato bug which are straight out of you know nightmares we used to live by the beach where we had potato bugs we don't have them here thankfully but when we live by the beach they bury themselves in the sandy soil and so you're digging and minding your own business and all of a sudden one pops out this is your name i run screaming like a six-year-old girl where were we oh tomato worms okay tomato worms can defoliate a plant in no time but if you're vigilant and you keep keep an eye on things you'll see some of the first signs and that is stripped leaves and you'll also start to see some of their droppings which aren't tiny now usually a plant doesn't have hundreds of tomato worms on it it's usually a few fat greedy ones and so the first method to get rid of them would be to simply pick them off now that could be difficult in the daytime because they are very camouflaged i mean they blend right into the leaves but at nighttime they're sitting ducks how you may ask well you just need a little piece of equipment now that piece of equipment is a black white flashlight they're about 10 on amazon but they will make the tomato worm literally glow in the dark and makes them super easy to find and pick off now if you have a big outbreak of them or maybe cut worms you're going to have to break out the big guns and organically that means bt now bt is a powerhouse organic substance that is really good for any type of caterpillar worm type pest just mix it according to the bottle directions spray it on your plants and it literally will get rid of every single one of them it's amazing stuff now you can use this as a preventative i just use it whenever i see evidence of the worms now a lot of people think birds are pests because they bite into their tomatoes or peck their tomatoes but birds are actually really beneficial for the garden i see them all the time eating pests and bugs and things off of my plants and really they're not eating the tomato because they like tomato they're eating the tomato for the water and so i have you know if you can put a bird bath out or something that's gonna take their attention from the tomato and just use the bird bath i have two ponds back here and i've never once had a bird peck my tomatoes now you know my main pest for my tomatoes are rats if you've been with me any length of time you've heard me lament about rats over and over again and you guys have given a ton of possible solutions cats okay i'm allergic to cats but my neighbors have cats and we still have rats uh get a terrier boomer is a terrier and he could not care less um electric traps the high frequency noise emitters motion lights i've tried everything the only thing that consistently works for me are snap traps and i make sure i get the kind that make it very easy to dispose of what's in the trap i'll put a link down to those below everything i mentioned in this video that i use i'll put down below in case you want to look at them but that's that's the only way i've been able to make it work and it's been successful if i'm consistent it's been very successful for me now something that i interestingly don't have a problem with on my tomatoes are squirrels and i say interestingly because we've got a ton of squirrels that use our back fence as a highway and if you've seen my videos you've probably seen squirrels running back and forth but i've never had a squirrel attack or or touch my tomatoes or anything in my vegetable garden they really stay to the fence probably should knock on wood there now if you do have this problem there are a few things that you can do number one a dog is great boomer loves to chase the squirrels but he is inside most of the time but if you have a dog that's outdoors all the time i mean problem solved there is another thing you can spray and that would be predator urine wolf urine and coyote urine is available on amazon um and probably other places people swear by it sounds gross but people do swear by it and it makes sense another thing you can spray is pepper tea and i'll put a recipe down in the description of the video to that but basically you make this concoction with hot peppers and you spray it on your plants and these squirrels don't like it so check that recipe out give it a try let me know if that works in any of these sprays that i'm mentioning you always want to do a test on your plant in your climate um you know try the test out on a couple of leaves let it sit 24 hours see if there's any bad reaction to your plant if not go ahead and you know you're safe to spray that well i think that'll do it with pests and diseases if you have any questions or solutions to pests and diseases that we you know didn't mention here um please let us know in the comments and i will see you guys on what i'm now calling faq friday bye [Music] you

Channel: Next Level Gardening

Views: 288,054

Keywords: tomato, garden, tomatoes, gardening, growing tomatoes, organic, gardening tips, pest control, pest, vegetable gardening, disease, diseases, how to grow tomatoes, organic gardening, vegetable garden, hornworm, gardening hacks, gardening for beginners, migardener, container gardening, urban gardening, raised bed gardening, growing tomatoes in containers, organic garden, how to, black spot, neem oil, hydrogen peroxide for plants, baking soda for plants, aspirin, blossom end rot

Id: 6db7a5Hum_I

Length: 18min 46sec (1126 seconds)

Published: Tue May 12 2020