What’s the matter with my Maters?

nefrugalgardener — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 04:04:22 +0000

When transplanting the tomatoes that I grew from seed, I noticed that they had yellowing leaves. They had developed this way in the pots, and I had hoped they would improve with planting. They did not. I had read that they might be suffering from Fusarium wilt. A pathogen that lives in the soil. The sure-fire way to fight this is by planting varieties with a VNF resistance. But I’d grown Beefsteak tomatoes before without issues, and the potting soil I had planted them in was “pure”. My Tiny 100′s have been doing fine, so I suspected the Beefsteak variety seeds I had purchased this time may have not had the resistance needed. Other information I had researched said it could be lack of iron in the soil. Since my raised beds were new, with new soil this year I was unsure. An additional aspect of failure could have also been the hoops with plastic I had over my potted plants in early Spring. Did they hold too much water on the leaves when it was cold leading to fungus and perhaps yellowing of the leaves? I decided to experiment. Being an old yankee gardener I picked off the affected leaves and discarded them. If it was a fungus on the leaves, that should take care of it. If it was a lack of iron in the new soil, I could attempt to remedy that. After all, I had some iron tablets about to expire. I ground up about 10 iron tablets and soaked them in a gallon of water over night. When the tomatoes needed water, I applied this solution to the soil in one row and marked the row as my “test group”. So far, the leaves are greening up. My control group (with the yellowed leaves I had also plucked off – without the iron solution), are also looking better. So…is it that the all of the plants were stressed and setting new roots? Was it a fungus on the leaves? Was it lack of iron? Only time will tell. More updates to come!

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What’s the matter with my Maters?