Wednesday 10 February 2010

RIP tomatoes

It's been less than a month since I diagnosed my tomatoes with fusarium wilt. In that time they've continued to ripen, I've gotten about two dozen rouge de marmandes (minus a few more with blossom end rot) and several cereal bowls worth of Tommy Toes.  But the plants went from this on January 17th:
http://www.alexareynolds.com/garden10/tomatoesjan.JPG
To this on February 6th:
http://www.alexareynolds.com/garden10/fusarium1.JPG
The poor things hung on for a while but once they started downhill they went down fast.  On Wednesday I picked another set of ripening Tommy Toes but the seeds inside were black.  That's when I decided they had to go, despite a few more fruit desperately clinging on.

But when I went to complete my diagnosis I was in for a surprise.  This is what the inside of the stem looked like:
http://www.alexareynolds.com/garden10/fusarium3.JPG
Those white bits are perfectly healthy tissue.  With fusarium wilt they're meant to be discoloured brown, like this.  So now I'm confused and frustrated.  Did they really have wilt?  Should I have pulled up the plants or left them longer?  If it wasn't wilt what else could have made them cark it so quickly?  And how do I keep this from happening next year?

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