Is that A Disease On My Tomato Plants?

Now that your seedlings are big enough to be planted outside they need to be hardened off.  This is done by bringing them outdoors gradually and I start adding an hour a day until they are up to a full day in the sun. This is a very important step as to much change to fast can kill your seedlings.  

After planting your tomatoes into your garden, it's a good idea to put mulch around them as this helps keep the soil moist and also keeps the fruit from sitting directly on the ground. Mulch also acts as a slow release fertilizer and helps keep down the weeds. Good mulch should contain lawn clippings, fall leaves that have been shredded down with the lawn mower or shredder, coffee grounds, sawdust, wood chips etc.

Your tomato plants are starting to get really big and have a lot of little blossoms on them….So why are the leaves wilting at the bottom of my plants?  Does my tomato plant have a disease?  It could be a disease but if you follow these easy organic fixes you could head off many tomato plant diseases (like early and late blight diseases).  From the time I put my tomato plants in the garden start alternating an organic copper based fungicide one week and a sulfur based fungicide the next all through the growing season.

If you haven't been using a fungicide and start to notice that the leaves are starting to turn brown and curl at the bottom of your tomato plants then prune off the affected leaves and destroy them (you might have to do this every couple of days until under control).  Then start with alternating the fungicides

Another good tip is to water early in the day to cut down on evaporation losses and also to give your plants plenty of time to dry out. Wet foliage overnight may help trigger some diseases.

There's nothing like picking and eating that first juicy tomato…Mmmmm.