Tomato death. Need to know why

Been too busy to think. We have had lots of flooding, and I haven't made it out to this bed at all. I am pulling out the grasses and weeds, planning to stake the tomato plants, and mulch it.
Until I saw this. Pictures were taken from right to left in the bed.

Nothing nothing tra la la. Tomatoes and weeds.


Then the next ones over....
Dead plants.


Close up of leaves


Next ones over look iffy but still alive


Only bug signs I saw, I don't think it's involved, if anyone can ID them too, I'd appreciate it.


Close up of leaves looking like they are headed down



And the next plant over is just barely freckled


Questions:
1. Is this something from excess water? It HAS been soggy as hell. I have noticed I have mildew on some weeds, usually don't see that till August. The affected area is not the shadiest part of the bed though....
2. Is it soil borne? I DID have tomatoes here last year, they did NOT do this. (This is the bed that mom found easiest to keep picked last year, that's why I replanted there.) I have more plants I can put in if I tear these out, trying to decide if I'm just condemning them to death if I do.
3. Is it going to spread? I have another bed of very healthy plants, if I have to I can remove all of these, although I hate to, there's about 40 plants in that area.
4. Anything I can do besides remove and quarantine dispose of the affected plants?
5. Anything I don't know to ask?
Edit: 6. If I have to cull all of the tomatoes, I have pepper plants that I can put in there, will they die too?

Crap.
Help??

Edit: CRAP!! There's leaves going down in the other end of the bed, where I pulled yesterday. I don't recall noticing them, but that area has a big black ant colony I was trying to not rile up as I weeded. I was a wee bit distracted.
I'm gonna have to kill them all, aren't I?

Your profile suggests that you have this garden in SW Missouri ..?... so I'm think if that region with this response and will add this tomato disease link from the University of Arkansas:  https://www.uaex.uada.edu/farm-ranch/pest-management/plant-disease/tomatoes.aspx

With recent flooding there and now I suspect more normal heat and sun, this may favor root disease. Also, see  https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-fusarium-and-verticillium-wilt/  --  I suspect mostly Fusarium or Verticillium wilt, but hard to tell without further tests.  The leaf spots may be caused additionally by Septoria fungus.  For some of these, it won't matter if it was not seen in a previous year... Plant diseases can have a large influence from the weather and this year's weather in the midwestern states of the U.S., from Texas to the Canadian border, has been a real trial.  Do you know if your tomato varieties are heirloom or saved from past year's seeds from your garden or were they from a seed catalog?....or plants purchased from a local nursery/retailer?  Often a "VF" designation will occur with some varieties if they are deemed to be resistant to Verticillium and Fusarium wilt.

Hard to say what to do in this case as the vascular wilt fungi colonize the inside of plant stems and leaves often down into the roots.  If you wanted to try a more organic attempt to cure some of the remaining plants, you could try this  organic bio-fungicide -- essentially a beneficial strain of Bacillus that suppresses fungal disease but additionally *may* be able to colonize the same spaces in the plant where the fungus is:    

https://growarber.com/products/bio-fungicide variant=39357030826071¤cy=USD&utm_medium=product_sync&utm_source=google&utm_content=sag_organic&utm_campaign=sag_organic&gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjw97SzBhDaARIsAFHXUWC_6MoL_mlVtloViRTpICmGRkQvXNMannejLIFWhKU1ihbh00FdENYaApscEALw_wcB        

(Product link didn't paste right....may need to copy and paste into search window.)  In such a scenario it might be advisable to dig up and move the plants attempting to be saved either to a different location or to clean soil in a pot, making sure to add the product to the roots as you transplant.  No guarantees with this, but may be worth trying with the best looking plants.    Tough issue, this..... Hope something is salvageable, Pearl!

Thank you John!! :D
Yes, SW Missouri, similar to the Arkansas Ozark area, different soil, but similar climate. I have less clay and less rocks, more actual dirt :D

These are heirloom cherry/small types, some bought from seed companies (Baker Creek or Southern Exposure Seed Exchange) and some saved from previous years. Let me think... I have in that bed:
Hartman's Yellow Gooseberry: (rareseeds.com, which is Baker Creek's site, is out of them and the blurb is gone)
Barry's Crazy Cherry; https://www.rareseeds.com/tomato-barry-s-crazy-cherry
Yellow Pear: saved by either me or one of the other permies I trade with. I've been growing them for several years, not sure which seeds I used. I LOVE THOSE! I get about 1000 fruits per plant! The plant I kept seeds from had fat fruits about 2 inches long, if it was my seeds they were off that plant.
Principe Borghese: heirloom out of Italy, awesome tomato, got a big pack of them years ago and they still are the best!  
Tommy Toe: bred in Arkansas, work well in this climate, handle heat and humidity, out of a pack from Baker Creek.  https://www.rareseeds.com/tomato-tommy-toe
Gate Red: which is something from my open pollinated crossing of heirlooms, whatever it is, it's red, rowdy, ping pong ball sized, and ate the gate one year. So those are my saved seed.

All of those are my best types, have done well in the past, and most likely to be fantastic growers here. Those are all I started this year, lots of each. The ones in the other bed (at the front of the house) are chest high and amok.

I'll study up on the wilts. I gardened for 30+ years in the desert, and all I have ever seen tomatoes die of was lack of water/sunscald. Missouri still puzzles me with all the weird fungi. I have definitely never seen die off like this.

Just an added note that if some of the plants squeak through to produce tomatoes, you may wish to save seed since they may have some level of natural resistance to the disease.  Similar to what Joseph Lofthouse and others are doing, by including some of these seeds into future plantings, you be be able to select each year for better resistance to the diseases if they rear their heads again in future plantings.  Here's hoping your climate returns to more 'normal' conditions down the road and that the disease issues recede as a consequence.  Good luck!

[PS   Will try to remember to poll some gardening friends outside of Fayetteville, AR to see if they've been seeing or hearing of similar problems this year.]

I'm really hoping someone can look at these pictures and know exactly what it is. It has to be something common, but both of the wilts look iffy from here, although that may be my lack of understanding.

Bump bump bump this thread...
I need to do something with them in the morning, and I have no plan yet. I hate to pull them all, but I may do it anyway. If it IS something icky in the soil I need it to not breed more, and that means remove the food source...

I had tomato plants dying suddenly in May to June but the symptoms were different from yours. And I am pretty sure those were caused by soil borne pathogens when the ground was saturated leading to anaerobic environment. The situation was exacerbated when the plant's root systems were damaged at the same time from weeding and staking. The onset was very fast and the plants died in a matter of days, different from the slower death of fire blight or other diseases developing later in the season.

You can still use the bed since there are always pathogenic microbes dwelling in the soil but take precautions not to make plants vulnerable to their attack.

I can feel for you pearl, but I have no answers. I recognize the damage, but my experience has been a leaf here or there, not death of plants. When I do see this damage I prune the affected branches along with enough additional suckers to increase air flow. But it has never gotten bad enough to research and pin a name on the problem.

Tomatoes seem like a desert adapted species to me. Therefore, they don't do well in damp conditions. I hear that you've had so much water recently.

I don't pay attention to pestilences in my garden. I allow the climate and pests to kill whatever they'd like and I don't try to fight diseases, rather I encourage them. The sooner they kill the weak plants, the sooner the survivors will learn strength. Because tomatoes as a species have so little genetic diversity, I gave up saving seeds from them, because they don't have enough genetic diversity to adapt to my ecosystem.

I noticed someone said this is a holiday weekend, it isn't in my life, and I wasn't aware of that.
I think I'll cull the worst of them today, and give this thread a couple more days, in hopes of not having to cull the rest.

The soil has dried out enough in the bed I have been working in that I can get back to it for a few days. Some of the plants are getting a chance, but I still REALLY HOPE someone knows what is going on.

:D

Pearl Sutton wrote:......Some of the plants are getting a chance, but I still REALLY HOPE someone knows what is going on.

Pearl,   Do you have a county extension office nearby that deals with home gardening?  When it comes to identifying garden problems, they aren't foolproof, but they often do have the backing and knowledge base coming from the Agricultural Extension realm of the regional land grant university,.....in your case, the University of Missouri in Columbia.   So they would be the most knowledgeable and impartial assistants in trying to diagnose what is killing your tomatoes.  For example....and not knowing you exact location....I'm seeing extension offices of the U. of Missouri in Barry, Newton, and Jasper counties in SW Missouri.  If you are in any of those counties and if their offices are open tomorrow, you could bring in some plant material for them to examine.  Always best to call them in advance to see what services they offer and what to bring along if they are equipped and staffed to help those in your situation.

Try not to bring in material that is already dead and rotting as these specimens already are beginning to be colonized by 'necrotrophic' fungi and bacteria -- organisms that did not themselves kill the plant, but are taking over now that the plant is dead.  This just ends up confusing the diagnosis.  Best material is green plant material that is already showing signs of wilting.  You would only need 2-3 good branches of this type from a few plants for them to make a good stab at what is causing your problem.  But also ask the extension agent what they feel you should bring in.  I agree that it helps to know what is in there for future reference.  Even if you never had this problem before, the disease amount that you are seeing will suggest that spores with be there for the coming years.  Let's just hope the environment in those years isn't as conducive to disease as this year!  Good luck!....

Oh, good idea! They might have a guess, but they are mostly for chemical using farms. They might have a guess though, they are smart about plants. I have had them ID strange things before.

Pearl Sutton wrote:Oh, good idea! They might have a guess, but they are mostly for chemical using farms. They might have a guess though, they are smart about plants. I have had them ID strange things before.

Yes, the solutions they will offer most likely will be of a chemical/synthetic nature.  Occasionally some of the staff will be knowledgeable about more organic or natural solutions as well, but it's a crap shoot as to whether such would be available and if such a solution exists.  But for diagnosing the problems, they often can be quite good and may be able to confirm just what the problem agent is that you are dealing with.  Good luck, Pearl....  One last thought:  Our local retailers are still selling transplants for gardens since we are so far north.  Are any of your nurseries still selling tomato plants?  If any are and *if* you can confirm that some small six-pack of them are Verticillium-Fusarium resistant, you could buy one little container of them and plant into the same region where the plants were dying.  If the problem is from either of these two fungi, then these new plants *should* not have a problem, although there can be exceptions.  But it may help to corroborate what the extension office may find.  Although we are near the end of our window for planting now for tomatoes (typical first frost in mid to late September), I was thinking you might have a later frost date and can still plant a bit later than us.

I don't know what it is, but that sort of thing happens all the time here.  Things will be dead in 1-3 days, suddenly.  It happens especially to dill, Swiss chard, and tomatoes.  I think they are diseases spread by insects (although that is just a guess)...could be that the fire trucks are NOT causing the fire, and they just are there every time there's a fire, for other reasons.  

All I do is throw them in a hot compost pile.  Yes, I know -- people say to not do that, but there is no garbage dump in Nature; the forest will recycle anything diseased as well.

The best luck I've had with tomatoes is the wild currant types, because not only do the fruit mature faster than larger ones, but also, if the plant dies suddenly, you have had a harvest in the meantime, as opposed to waiting for the (usually) later maturation of other varieties.

And they are easy to pick the suckers off and re-root, to have backup plants.  They tend to sprawl out of control.

Matt's Wild Cherry and White Currant do well here.  Sometimes varieties bred by the University of Hawaii will survive (I mean the larger cherry or grape varieties).

Yes, it's possible to grow big tomatoes here, but I don't want to deal with all the headaches, so I go with the easiest, least-maintenance varieties.  They often will self seed in strange places and keep growing without my help.  Perfect!

And likely if I took better care to feed the soil and keep up with maintenance, I'd get better results.  But you know...life happens.  And that's why we love permaculture.  Diversity for the ebbs and flows.

Have you considered replacing with more of a mix of plants?  I mean, not only peppers or tomatoes, but other types of plants altogether, and finding a different place for the other peppers and tomatoes?

Like more beneficial attractants, perhaps?  Or herbs.  Allysum, cosmos, basil, etc?  I see what looks like zinnia leaves there, but otherwise, no real pollinator/insect food or flowers.  That might help balance the ecosystem, so if that disease is insect-borne, having predator insects around might end the problem for you.  

Focus on creating an ecosystem, as opposed to focusing on the disease.  Focus on the solution, rather than the problem...in other words....?  Just some thoughts...

Hi Pearl. This looks very similar to the problem I have with tomatoes nearly every year, usually in the early part of summer just as they really get cranking. I'm not sure it is a single "disease" but possibly a group of opportunistic pathogens, mostly fungal, that like warm and wet conditions. Around here most gardeners call it early blight, as distinguished from the bacterial blights that tend to show up in autumn as things cool down and the rains return.

The common wisdom here is to prune out all the laterals and have a single main stem that you train up and tie to a stake. I resisted that for a while, because my method back in the desert was to let the plants become big sprawling bushes that shaded as much of the ground as possible to keep the roots cool. But apparently all that vegetation restricts air movement and creates an armpit-like environment that the bad fungi seem to like. The other point I balked at in the pruning method was my intuition that we want as little injury to our plants as possible -- every wound is an entry point and it's like putting up a FREE BEER sign on a bar in a college town.

So now I do try and prune my plants. I use a sharp knife and only do it on a sunny day, preferably in the morning (Joseph, we can hear you snickering). And I put all the large suckers in soil and set them in a shady place to root. This is my ace in the hole: I now have replacements at the ready, and more often than not the first round of plants will get diseased and die right at the peak of summer about the start of the new year. I plant out the clones, most of which are already flowering, and now the weather tends to be dry and not so conducive to the blight. So I get some tomatoes after all.

I haven't really resorted much to any other interventions, although there were a few years that I tried antifungal brews like horsetail and potassium bicarbonate. Can't say conclusively that either of those helped, and my default time-poor approach to gardening means that mixing up a spray and putting it on is one more thing I Do Not Need in my day at the point in the growing season when everything is taking off.

So far people have given good advice….get copper to spray them and everything else near them with…it’s in the soil and may require “ burning it out” …black plastic over clean soil for a few weeks in the sun will help to sterilize the soil ( sort of ) and re adding nematodes and beneficial bacteria will also need to be done. We farmed organically in the Black Dirt Region of Orange County , NY and one year it was very wet and over night lost 200 tomato plants… couldn’t get the copper on fast enough…it also affected potato’s and other crops…
It’s not easy fighting Mother Nature. Don’t be discouraged. We are now in the Black Hills of Wyoming in a narrow canyon with lots of shade until ( now ) 830 am until 5pm… We built a cattle panel greenhouse for the tomato’s and eggplant and dukes…and we have a 1500 sq ft garden…and I eat mainly carnivore…

I garden in West Virginia, similar climate to MO, and get tomato blights every year. I try to keep it down by planting in cages, mulching, and removing lower leaves in a gradual process as the blights come up from the ground. But I always get early blight and sometimes maybe septoria and late blight--a couple times I've had one or two plants suddenly wilt, and I carefully remove them and their cage without touching other plants, and that's the end of it, I don't have much problem with wilts. I don't think those photos look like early blight, except maybe the last one--it, and the similar septoria, work their way up the plant gradually so the top leaves will be green and healthy while middle leaves are full of brown spots and yellow halos, and bottom leaves are brown and dead. I get enough tomatoes by planting resistant varieties--the best ones I've found are Defiant--which is also very early, but it's hybrid and high priced; and Stellar, also hybrid and coming in a little later, I also grow some paste tomatoes, and some for delicious fresh tomatoes--I liked Pink Berkeley Tie-Dye but got fed up with how disease prone it was, last year I tried Chocolate Stripes and liked it a lot. Persimmon gives a nice blast of sizable yellow tomatoes when the others are flagging. So by having a variety I have enough tomatoes coming in through the season to can enough sauce and salsa, the last two years I got about 50% more than a year's supply so this year I am growing only three plants for fresh eating, hoping that will reduce the disease load next year.

It might not help this year, but I have heard that burying a few aspirin pills with tomatoes can help with certain diseases?

Pearl i had this last year,it is most likely soil borne and the rain splashing it up on your plants,cover your soil with something.You can also cover your plants from getting rained on completely by making a temporary greenhouse over them so the rain doesnt hit the ground around them.Fresh wood chip mulch might help also,the wood from fresh chips should not have disease yet and could prevent it from becoming a splash hazard by keeping it under the chips.Old chips could already be infected so only use new ones.Cardboard,black plastic or landscape fabric if you have  it would work very well.I hope you can get them back to good health,good luck!