Hi,

My tomato plants are wilting and then dying. They develop bumps on the stem and a brown groove all along the stem.

I think that they are splitting from the heat and not enough water.

I've had bumps like that on tomato plants that were otherwise healthy. Could you post a pic of the leaves? This might help explain why your plants are dying. Diseases often show in the leaves, so if this is a disease, diagnosis could be done by the condition of the leaves. It would also help if you could give some details about the plants growing conditions.

gardenfish said:I've had bumps like that on tomato plants that were otherwise healthy. Could you post a pic of the leaves? This might help explain why your plants are dying. Diseases often show in the leaves, so if this is a disease, diagnosis could be done by the condition of the leaves. It would also help if you could give some details about the plants growing conditions.

Hi, thank you for your response. The leaves are healthy, they just wilt as the tree dies. We have a greenhouse set up with timed watering system. They grow beautifully and healthy reaching 3-4 feet and start to produce tomatoes. Then they start to wilt until they die. When we removed the dead plants, the roots look fine. We live in the tropics where the rain is frequent and the draining of the ground is slow. So, even though the greenhouse is covered, the water level on the ground sometimes comes up when it rains. So I thought it may be excess water coming from underneath.

Can you post photos of the rest of the plant?

To begin, since you obviously have some kind of problem, I'd turn off the auto watering and water according to good practice, which is when the soil about two or three finger joints deep is no longer moist. Properly done, you won't be watering more than about twice a week.

Now, you observed the roots and probably correctly deduced that they were not being drowned, even though water is getting in. Therefore, consider that they are going short of water. The draining nature of soil has a lot to do with it, but tomatoes want about 2 inches of water a week. So for a container of 12 inches diameter, two inches is 226 cubic inches of very close to one gallon per week. If you have a lot of pebbles or perlite in the mix, it might take more.

I'd discount the bumps. Tomoto hide gets rough.
The splitting supports the idea of being habitually short of water and getting periodic but inadequate waterings. Perhaps brief daily waterings that do not maintain soil moisture.

Thank you all for your replies. I will take more photos tomorrow when the sun is out. I will turn off the automatic watering system for now also. I'll send you guys the photos tomorrow. Thank you! Good night!

Ok, sorry for the late reply. Here's a photo of the latest dead plant and it's roots. The rest of the photos are of my set up and my still-healthy plants. Thank you for any ideas you may provide!

Wow, this is a mystery! I really can't tell what has caused this. And the supposedly dead plant doesn't, to me, look all that dead. The roots do look good on it, at least to me. And your live plant looked very good! Healthy and growing. Maybe the poor plant just wasn't getting enough water due to your system, that's the only thing I can think of.

gardenfish said:Wow, this is a mystery! I really can't tell what has caused this. And the supposedly dead plant doesn't, to me, look all that dead. The roots do look good on it, at least to me. And your live plant looked very good! Healthy and growing. Maybe the poor plant just wasn't getting enough water due to your system, that's the only thing I can think of.

It is a mystery indeed. They wilt until they die. Then the next one follows. As if it were a plague moving along the planter. I ripped this one out before it completely died because I thought -- if it's a plague -- it may contaminate the other plants too. That one is the 6th death.

Well, now that you say wilt, a bell went off in my mind. I'm wondering.... versillium wilt? Bacterial wilt? The way to diagnose this is to slice open the stem; if the inside of the stem is blocked, dried up and funny looking it's wilt. Try doing this, cut the stem in half, look at it, then try to post a pic of it. I've had tomato plants die of wilt: if it is wilt, I will recognize it in the pic.

Here's the photo of the cut stem.

Yes, I do think it is some kind of wilt disease. I'm sorry. I hope someone else will see this pic and weight in on this.

What immediately struck me was the small root system.

I grow 3-4 foot tomatoes in containers. . . and have for over 5 years. Each year, in preparation for winter/the NEXT growing season, I pull up the entire plant ; my normal root systems are almost twice as big !

@gardenfish, have you ever heard of a tomato stalk borer? Me neither but read the last paragraph and then find photos on Google:

https://hortnews.extension.ias....

BetNC said:What immediately struck me was the small root system.

I grow 3-4 foot tomatoes in containers. . . and have for over 5 years. Each year, in preparation for winter/the NEXT growing season, I pull up the entire plant ; my normal root systems are almost twice as big !

Maybe its the nice soil in your posts. My tomatoes usually have a root system about that big but I'm growing them in the alkali desert.

Rosario is growing in raised beds on laterite. Its pure aluminum and iron and probably would make great adobe bricks but not so much for growing vegetables. When the roots hit the laterite, they are done growing downwards. The roots on Rosario's plants are growing sideways.

Daisy, I've never heard of tomato vine borers, but I am very familiar with squash vine borers, the reason I can't grow squash. Good article. Now with the squash vine borer, the moth lays the eggs in the lower of the plant, which then hatched and burrows into the vine, I think. The article didn't mention if the tomato borer moth laid the eggs in the flower. I've read that squash vine borer moths can be prevented by using a light row cover during blooming. Now how you get fruit hasn't been explained to me, because it would seem that using a row cover would prevent bumblebees from pollinating the plant.
I think tomato vine borers must be relatively rare; never heard of them before. I did see the yellow dried vascular ring in this tomato stem pic.I do know that squash vines that have borers are very slimy and oozy, not dry.

DaisyI said:

Maybe its the nice soil in your posts. My tomatoes usually have a root system about that big but I'm growing them in the alkali desert.

Rosario is growing in raised beds on laterite. Its pure aluminum and iron and probably would make great adobe bricks but not so much for growing vegetables. When the roots hit the laterite, they are done growing downwards. The roots on Rosario's plants are growing sideways.

They are growing sideways! Is there anything I can do about that? Could that be causing the problem?

Thank you gardenfish. That's what I needed to know. I've never seen any of the stem boring critters although our peppers did have fruit borers one year.

Rosario, the roots growing sideways are not a problem. The roots won't travel into the clay soil under your raised beds as long as they have that cushy soil to grow in.

I may have solved the mystery though. The tomato plants have all the symptoms of Bacterial Wilt (Ralstonia solanaearum).

https://plantpath.ifas.ufl.edu...

There is an easy test described in the article.

"Another common sign of the disease can be observed when the cut stem sections are placed in clear water as shown in Photo 6. It consists of a viscous white spontaneous slime streaming from the cut end of the stem. This streaming represents the bacterial ooze exuding from the cut ends of colonized vascular bundles (Photo 6).


This "stem-streaming" test is easy to conduct and can be used as a valuable diagnostic tool for quick detection of bacterial wilt in the field."

Cut a stem and put it in a glass of water. Watch for the white filiments to flow from the cut. Report back.

I'm going to do the test now. Thanks!