Question: How can I manage whatever seems to be in our garden soil that kills our tomato plants?
I don’t know if it is fungus or blight or what it is, but the last 4 years, our tomato plants have been consumed by something that turns the leaves brown and kills them. We get tomatos, but its a race to see if the plant will die before the fruit ripens.
What are you using for fertilizer? And when you originally made the planters, what did you use for soil?
What you have is called Blight. There are two kinds: Early Blight and Late Blight.
What you have is Early Blight, and just about every gardener I know battles it, including me!
Late Blight is the REAL killer - we’re talking Potato Famine magnitude. We rarely see it. It has to be ‘introduced’ to an area via bad plant material. It is not in the soil all the time as is Early Blight.
So, a few things you can do to slow it down.
Grow tomato varieties that are blight-resistant
http://www.tomatodirt.com/blight-resistant-tomato-varieties.html
When you plant your tomatoes, mulch them well. The spores in the soil splash onto the lower leaves via watering and rain. The more SOIL you keep covered, the less that will happen.
Which leads me to watering. Water your tomatoes right at the BASE; no overhead watering! Put that sprinkler away!
Prune the bottom leaves and stems from your plants as they grow. They don’t produce fruit anyway, and are a pathway for the spores to work their way UP the plant as it grows.
Plant your tomatoes with enough ‘air’ around them for good circulation. This also helps. Crowded plants will spread disease quickly to themselves and to the neighboring plants.
Copper Spray. It’s organic. When my plants are pruned from the bottom, I also apply a good spray to the bottom 1/3 of the plant, and continue to do so throughout the growing season...until I’m tired of it and the season is almost over and I no longer CARE if I see another tomato...until NEXT season, LOL!
This is all off the top of my head, so here’s a link to the basics for you, in case I missed something.
https://gardenerspath.com/how-to/disease-and-pests/early-blight-tomato/