Mystery Wilt

It was suggested that my tomatoes have Fusarium wilt, a fungus, and that's why they're looking bad. I did some reading and I don't think that's what I have. It could be, I'm not a plant pathologist and I don't have a lab but it doesn't look like the pictures and description on the net.

With fusarium wilt, the fungus moves into the plant through the roots and is does damage to the tissues in the stem that transport water and nutrients. There should be visible dark spots between the woody inner layer of the stem and the outer layer. Since they're in bad shape, I cut a couple down and looked inside. No dark spots.

no black spots

Although the whole plant just looks sickly, the tips of the new leaves look the worst and this doesn't seem like fusarium either.

mystery wilt

Just in case, I wanted to spray something. It seems like the right thing to do so I gave everything a good coat of Daconil fungicide. Hopefully I can stop whatever this is from spreading.

So I don't know what's really wrong but as long as it doesn't spread to other plants the point is now moot. I pulled the bad tomatoes out and bought a couple of nice big tomato plants yesterday at the garden center. These got planted at the other end of the garden so they don't get the same disease. So now I've got two plants instead of seven but I don't like tomatoes anyway so two is plenty.

new tomatoes, not dead yet

In other garden news: I couldn't' find any cucumber plants last weekend to replace my dead ones. I got lucky and found some yesterday while looking for tomatoes. I've finished the cucumber trellis and should have enough for pickles now.

cucumber trellis

The bush type peas in the garden didn't do very well. We got a few pods but they never really took off. I've had trouble with peas before. The vine type peas did well on their trellis and are just about done. If we want any more peas, we had better pick them in the next few days.

peas

I personally don't want any peas and I can't imagine anybody else going out to pick any so I guess we won't have to eat any peas. Peas are pretty bad, even for vegetables. My daughter ate a few pea pods when they were smaller with ranch dressing and like them that way. They don't have much flavor when they're small pods so the pods were really just a ranch dressing delivery system and I can appreciate that but now that they actually taste like peas, I'll pass.

peas