Have you seen problems with your homegrown tomatoes? One expert explains why

MT. JULIET, Tenn. (WKRN) — It’s the time of the year where those of you who planted a vegetable garden last spring are enjoying the fruits of your labor. However, you may have noticed a few problems with your tomato plants, particularly with all the rain that Middle Tennessee has seen recently.

Have you noticed brown and dying leaves towards the bottom of your plants? That’s called “Early Blight” and those leaves need to be removed.

Lucas Holman, UT Extension Director for Wilson County, explained what causes this and how to prevent it.

“Early blight is probably the most common disease that we see on tomatoes,” Holman explained. “It normally starts off with little black dots on the leaves, and they’ll have rings inside those dots and they’ll actually be dying from the bottom up. Early blight is caused by soil splashing up on the leaves.”

Holman said that there are ways to help prevent early blight.

“The number one way to try to prevent it is to put some newspaper or straw around the plant to prevent soil from splashing around those bottom leaves,” Holman said. “Once the leaves start dying off, go ahead and start breaking those leaves off.”

Then there’s the tomatoes themselves: have you seen splitting and cracking, especially on the tops of the tomatoes?

“We normally see an influx of tomatoes that split or crack after a lot of rainfall, “Holman said. “It’s usually because a plant doesn’t know when to stop taking up water. If you have some tomatoes that are starting to turn red or pink, and you know that there’s a good chance of rain in the next day or two, go ahead and pull those tomatoes off and let them ripen inside.”

This is pretty common with a lot of the heirlooms and older varieties of tomato. The newer hybrid tomatoes are less prone to splitting or cracking because they’ve been developed more for shipping as opposed to fresh eating.

While planting hybrid tomatoes can prevent some of these problems, but Holman pointed out a noticeable difference in flavor.

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“The flavor is just not there in some of the [hybrid] varieties. A lot of the older varieties that we grew up eating — the flavor was just great,” Holman said. “But they didn’t ship well and they had a lot of disease problems”.

You can also apply some safe organic fungicide sprays that are copper-based on the traditional tomatoes.

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