tomato diseases – Sustainable Market Farming

Summer pests and diseases

Hornworm on a tomato plant.
Photo Pam Dawling

It’s August, which for us is the peak time for pest insects as well as for fungal diseases.

This year, we have been collecting Japanese beetles from our okra plants, to prevent the leaves getting stripped off. It seems to be working. Many plants can take 30% defoliation without a loss of yield, but some years, our okra plants end up as just a bunch of stalks, and you know that means almost no photosynthesis can happen. Japanese beetles are one of the insects that have an aggregation pheromone, so those commercial traps are not only gathering up your own Japanese beetles, but also attracting neighbors’ beetles. Sometimes this means no net improvement, as the newcomers eat crops before going into the trap.

Another bad summer pest here is the Harlequin bug, a brightly colored stink bug. We try to have July be “No Visible Brassicas Month” aiming to disrupt their lifecycle. We use insect netting over the fall brassica seedlings we sow in June, and we clear our spring brassicas before the end of June. In July and July we use netting over any new brassica transplants, and sowings of turnips. During August we remove netting from older transplants and sowings, on to newer ones, such as kale and collards.

Leaf-footed bug, one of the stink bugs. Photo Kati Falger

Here’s a link to an article on Stink Bug Identification and Management in Vegetables, from the Alabama IPN Communicator Newsletter. Read More

I wrote about squash bugs and cucumber beetles on our hoophouse squash in June.

Squash bug nymphs and eggs
Photo Pam Dawling

Margaret Roach at A Way to Garden has a good post on distinguishing between the tobacco and the tomato hornworm.

The tobacco hornworms, Manduca sexta, is close cousins with the tomato hornworm,

Both species eat Solanaceous crops (nightshades) such as tobacco, tomato, peppers, eggplant and potatoes. The differences are in the stripes and the horns.

We have tobacco hornworms (this land was a tobacco farm before Twin Oaks bought it 51 years ago. This year, for the first time, we haven’t had any hornworms in the hoophouse. We’ve pulled up our tomato plants in there – we only grow the earlies in there, as it’s plenty warm enough to grow tomatoes outdoors here from May to October. I might be celebrating too soon – we still have a bed of peppers in the hoophouse and I think I might have seen evidence of a hornworm at work, although I could not find the culprit yesterday.

Tomato plant badly damaged by hornworm
Photo Pam Dawling

Pictures of Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus and other tomato diseases

We’re always a bit anxious that TSWV might show up one day, but luckily it hasn’t. Meanwhile we forget what it looks like. Here’s a few photos on the Cornell Vegetable MD Online site.

And here’s a good collection of tomato disease photos on the You Should grow site.

Spotty tomato leaves. I think this is Septoria Leaf Spot.
Photo Pam Dawling

All the news is not bad! Here’s a satisfying photo:

Hornworm mother Hawk Moth trapped by a zipper spider.
Photo Pam Dawling

BCS Berta Plow, Proofreading The Year-Round Hoophouse, Tomato Foliage Diseases

Our new equipment – a Berta rotary plow.
Photo Pam Dawling

In recent years we have mostly hand-shoveled the paths between our 90ft x 4ft raised beds. If we have two neighboring beds ready to prepare at the same time, we might use the hiller-furrower on our BCS 732 walk-behind tiller. But frankly that didn’t do as good a job as the old Troybilt hiller-furrower we used to have, and if you went off-course, there was no chance of a re-run to fix it. With the Troybilt you could fix a wiggle by steering hard on a re-run, but the BCS wouldn’t co-operate on that. So there was less incentive to use the BCS. We would measure and flag the bed, and have a person with a shovel at each end of each path, shoveling towards each other. Then we raked the bed, breaking up the big shovel-dollops.

Using the Berta rotary plow to make paths between our raised beds.
Photo Pam Dawling

Now we have a Berta Rotary Plow from Earth Tools BCS, and we are hopping with joy. It is easy to fit and unfit on our BCS, easy to use and does a lovely job. We flag the midline of the path, plow up one side of the path and back down the other. We get straighter paths, beds almost ready to use (no shovel-dollops!), and we save a lot of time, and don’t feel so tired!

A raised bed prepared with our Berta Rotary Plow, with some lettuce transplants under shadecloth.
Photo Pam Dawling

This week I am proofreading the Advance Proof of The Year-Round Hoophouse. A professional proofreader is also working through the advance proof at the same time, and the foreword and the endorsements are being written (or more likely, being thought about!).

So far, I have found a few inconsistencies to align. I guess I thought one thing when I wrote one chapter and something else a few months later when I wrote another chapter! I found a few tiny typos, even after so much careful checking here and during the professional copy-editing process. I found a few unclear bits, which I hope will now be clearer!

I relearned a few things I’d figured out for the book and then forgotten about! I impressed myself with seeing again all the information packed in there, from helpful tips to expansive over-views. I’m very much looking forward to having the book in my hands. Several more months yet. Publication date is November 20. New Society is taking pre-orders. When I’ve got some actual boxes of books I’ll update the Buy Now button here on my website and you can support-an-author and buy direct. I’ll sign the book for you!

Grow abundant produce year-round in any climate

Growing in hoophouses reduces the impact of increasingly unpredictable climate on crops, mitigates soil erosion, extends growing seasons, and strengthens regional food supply. The Year-Round Hoophouse teaches how to site, design, and build a hoophouse and successfully grow abundant produce all year in a range of climates.

Pam Dawling has been farming and providing training in sustainable vegetable production in a large variety of climates for over 40 years, 14 of which have been hoophouse growing. Pam’s first book is the best-selling Sustainable Market Farming: Intensive Vegetable Production on a Few Acres.

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Pre-order at www.newsociety.com before November 1 and receive a 20% discount.

Striped German tomato in our hoophouse. Note the lower leaves have been removed to reduce diseases.
Photo Alexis Yamashita

At the end of July or the first week of August we will pull up our hoophouse tomatoes and sow some soy as a cover crop until we are ready to prep the beds for winter greens. Our outdoor tomatoes are producing now, and as their yields increase, we’ll have no regrets about pulling up the aging hoophouse plants. We like to grow some heirlooms in there, and they are (in general) notorious for foliar diseases. I know some are disease-resistant, but we don’t only grow those ones! We did better this year at removing any lower leaves touching the ground, to dissuade any transfer of diseases from the soil.

Early in the season we had aphids and sooty mold, but ladybugs sorted out that problem. More recently we have had a little Early Blight, some Septoria leaf spot, and a sporadic issue that has concentrations of leaves with small silvery spots (dead leaf tissue). These are mostly located below webs of zipper spiders. Is it a disease, or the result of spider poop or dead prey detritus?

Zipper spider on a hoophouse tomato.
Photo Pam Dawling

Preparing for the Heritage Harvest Festival, winter hoophouse harvests

The Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello, Virginia, September 9 and 10, 2016

Now, at the height of summer, I am looking ahead to speaking events this fall, winter and next spring. (I have been in the habit of turning down presentations from May-August, so i can focus on our gardens). My first booking is the fun and local Heritage Harvest Festival at Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, near Charlottesville, Virginia. Click the link above to plan your visit.

Heritage harvest Festival Speakers include Joel Salatin, Ira Wallace, Michael Twitty and many more. Photo Southern Exposure — Heritage harvest Festival Speakers include Joel Salatin, Ira Wallace, Michael Twitty and many more.
Photo Southern Exposure

Friday is devoted to classroom workshops and walking tours. I will be giving my presentation on Fall Vegetable Gardening on Friday 2-3 pm. It’s a ticketed event, limited to the 32 people who can fit in the classroom. After the workshop I will be signing copies of my book from 3.15-3.45 pm at the Shop at Monticello, and chatting to whoever comes by. There are 30 other workshops on Friday, and 3 workshops on Sunday.

Monticello Garden Tour with Peter Hatch Photo courtesy of Monticello — Monticello Garden Tour with Peter Hatch
Photo courtesy of Monticello

The main event is on Saturday, with general admission from 9 am to 6 pm. Attend some of the 16 free workshops, the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange Tomato Tasting, the Chef demos, Seed swap, Monticello Shop tent and Kids activities. Spend your hard-earned cash in the Beer garden, at the Food concessions, and at 36 Premium Workshops (with pre-paid tickets).

OX_WoQaSw3pW03jzq16xGxrQ12fEY0vnBsBSMIKZcU8 I’ll be talking about Crop Rotations for Vegetables and Cover Crops at the Woodland Pavilion (50 seats) from 1.45 – 2.15 pm, followed by book signing at the Shop again.

WUYEtUc2f90RJlCLLZ6ksiyP2pDDoiPXJHtwiJkgI18 — Tomato medley. Photo courtesy of Monticello

If your tomatoes don’t look as wonderful as those in the Monticello photo above, you might be casting around for descriptions and photos of problems. Margaret Roach in her blog A Way to Garden, recently posted an interview with Dr Meg McGrath about tomato diseases, with photos. If you are worrying about Late Blight, you can sign up for alerts, although when I tried, my computer warned me the link to www.usablight.org was not secure. Margaret Roach’s Tomato Troubles FAQs has some good descriptions and many helpful links. One of the links is to Tom Stearn’s “tomato hygiene” management method.

We had trouble with our paste tomatoes, and got excellent help from the Plant Disease Clinic of the Virginia Cooperative Extension. Sadly, some of our plants seem to have been victim of some herbicide drift or cross-contamination, despite our best efforts to run our garden organically. We don’t control what falls out of the air. Happily, the plants recovered from the stunted curling in of the leaves, and are starting to pump out good yields. I hate the thought that we will be eating slightly poisoned tomatoes, even though they are still much better than commercially grown non-organic produce.

The August issue of Growing for Market magazine is out, along with my article about planning winter and early spring hoophouse harvests.

Here’s our month-by-month alphabetical list of what we plan to harvest:

November
Brassica baby salad mix, Bulls Blood
Beet greens, mizuna and frilly mustards, radishes, salad mix, spinach, tatsoi, thinnings of chard, baby turnips and greens for salad mix. We still have leaf lettuce outdoors, and only harvest from the hoophouse lettuce if the weather is bad outdoors.
December
Arugula, brassica baby salad mix, Bulls Blood Beet greens, chard for salad, Chinese cabbage, kale, leaf lettuce, baby lettuce mix, maruba santoh, mizuna and frilly mustards, pak choy, radishes, salad mix, scallions, senposai, nspinach, tatsoi, Tokyo bekana, turnips and greens, yukina savoy.

Hoophouse mizuna and lettuce mix. Photo by Kathleen Slattery — Hoophouse mizuna and lettuce mix.
Photo by Kathleen Slattery

January
Arugula, brassica baby salad mix, Bulls Blood Beet greens, chard, Chinese cabbage, kale, leaf lettuce, baby lettuce mix, maruba santoh, mizuna and frilly mustards, pak choy, radishes,
salad mix, scallions, senposai, spinach, tatsoi, Tokyo bekana, turnips and greens, yukina savoy.
February
Arugula, brassica salad mix, Bulls Blood Beet greens, chard, kale, leaf lettuce (we cut the whole heads from 2/21), baby lettuce mix, mizuna and frilly mustards, radishes, salad mix,
scallions, senposai, spinach, tatsoi, turnips and greens, yukina savoy.
March
Arugula, brassica baby salad mix, Bulls Blood Beet greens, chard, kale, leaf lettuce, lettuce heads, baby lettuce mix, mizuna and frilly mustards, radishes, salad mix, scallions, senposai, spinach, tatsoi, turnips and greens, yukina savoy.
April
Brassica baby salad mix, Bulls Blood Beet greens, chard, kale, leaf lettuce (may end in early April), lettuce heads (until late April, then lettuce from outdoors), baby lettuce mix, mizuna and frilly mustards, radishes, salad mix, scallions, spinach.

Other great articles include one by Eric and Joanna Reuter about growing chestnuts, one by Gretel Adams about growing flowers without plastic, including the wonderfully simple idea of fastening C-clamps on the bottom of the hood over the tiller to mark rows in the soil. There are reviews of two farming phone apps, one for CSA farmers and one called BeetClock, based of Richard Wiswall’s Organic Farmer’s Business Handbook.