![]() ![]() Tools, shoes, and hands can spread infested soil, so be sure to clean these before working with healthy plants. For the current season, make sure that you don’t spread soil from around the base of the diseased plants to the soil around healthy plants. In the case of both bacterial wilt and southern blight, unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done for the current crop of tomatoes once you have the disease. Southern blight can affect many other types vegetable plants, including peppers, green beans, and watermelons. As with bacterial wilt, tomato is not the only host of this disease. When this disease is present, white fungal growth and mustard seed-sized fungal structures called sclerotia can often be seen at the base of the stem, near the soil line. If the plant has bacterial wilt, a cloudy substance can often be seen streaming from the stem within several minutes.Īnother disease that often causes wilting of tomato plants is southern blight. This involves cutting the stem at the base and suspending the stem in water. While a lab test can confirm the presence of the disease, we can often be fairly sure that bacterial wilt is the cause of plant wilting by doing a bacterial streaming test. If a plant has bacterial wilt and you cut through the stem at the base, you may be able to see a brown color on the inside of the stem. A high level of soil moisture and hot temperatures favor this disease, so our conditions are often conducive for it. Bacteria and the slime they produce clog the water-conducting tissue of the plant and cause it to wilt. ![]() Southern bacterial wilt affects tomatoes and other plants in the same family, such as potatoes and eggplants. There are a quite a few possible causes of this but, other than lack or excess of water, the diseases southern bacterial wilt and southern blight are probably the most common reasons that tomato plants wilt in our area. During the late spring and summer, we often get calls about wilting tomatoes.
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