[Music] Welcome to the rusted garden homestead. This video is both about a great tomato harvest. I'm going to harvest everything and just show you all the tomatoes I I got out of the garden today. It's also about what do you do with tomato plants that are really beat up. It's been 90 plus degrees here just about every day. The humidity is almost 100%. It's raining every day. The sprays that I've put on my plants, tomato plants get washed off. The plants have diseases. They're just really beat up. So, I'm going to show you what they look like. talk about how to take care of them. But the first step when you have plants that are really beat up is to harvest everything off of there. So, I want to show you the damaged plants, the fruit that's on there, and just walk you through the process of getting them to really recover so that come, you know, middle August, later August, you have a longer growing season, September, you're getting more tomatoes out of the plant. So, let's take a walk through the garden that's kind of beat up. We'll take a look at all the tomatoes in my garden. These are Tiny Tims. They grow really well. They're a determinant variety, dwarf type tomato, and they produce all at once and then they die back. So, this is perfectly normal. There's a lot of tomatoes on there. I put in a lot of plants sometimes for videos, so I don't always get to eat and harvest everything, but there's some good tomatoes in there that are going to go into sauce. My recommendation would be just if you're growing the dwarf tomatoes, they're going to produce a lot of the cherry types at once. So, don't overdo it because you're not going to be able to keep up with and eat them all. Here is a tomato plant that self-seeded itself and it's actually one of the better looking plants. I wanted to start with that. Sometimes the plants that you know overwinter the seeds overwintered and they grow on their own do better. All the plants here have been sprayed with hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, even a stronger spray called dacanil to try and help out. None of it's working. Um the temperatures just are rough. 90 plus like 33 plus Celsius, 90% humidity or more. These are my sunolds and what's happening with all the rain. Here's another issue, too. So, if you have a lot of cracking fruit, like in here, you can't really do anything about that. It'd be nice, you know, if you think if we can water better or do something like that, they're not going to crack. Certain varieties are just prone to cracking more. And that's going to happen when you're getting an inch of rain in an hour like we're getting here a couple times a week now at Mar in Maryland. The tomatoes are going to crack. Some of the sprays are slowing down the fungal issues. These are um Juliet. These are all going to get harvested off. And I do leave the leaves on. You can cut them back, but when you cut back too many leaves, it ends up being a problem that your tomatoes can get sunsculled. Like this variety is just getting hammered and it could be heat related. You know, I took the shade cloth down when it temperatures dropped and I didn't put it back on, but these are all splitting because of the rain. So, I'm going to be removing all the split tomatoes, just dropping them on the ground. There's lots of tomatoes in here. I'm still going to get, you know, a great harvest. You're going to see a wonderful harvest, too. The thing with, you know, a garden is it can seriously get beat up and you can lose, let's say, half your plants or half the growth. You're still going to get a lot if you remove too many leaves from the tomatoes. And I'll show you examples as we walk through. The sun comes in and it, you know, damages the fruit. It's called sunscald. These have been a little bit more protected because I did have shade cloth over them, but the diseases are coming in. Again, I'm staying up on the spraying, but you can see all the tomatoes that are on there. This is what the fungal issues look like. I'm just not able to get it under control. And I will like spray baking soda and then it rains in the evening or, you know, early morning and I have to start over again. And I'm just kind of tired of it. But still good production and I'm taking a lot of tomatoes off of here. Cucumbers are doing well. I'll be doing videos on that, videos on peppers. Some more beat up plants. Let's swing around over to here. You can see one of the sprays. I just got frustrated, left the spray there. Cherokee purple, lemon boy. I mean it's a lot but at least 50% twothirds of the plants have fungal issues even with spraying. But now what you want to do is get rid of well not got rid of but harvest all the tomatoes on here. Here's an example of suncald. These are tomatoes and the sun just bleaches the skin and kind of cooks it a little bit and then you end up with that. You can cut that back. So, part of what I'm going to be doing is just going through and cleaning out all the healthy tomatoes. Tomatoes that are a little beat up, I'll cut off the split part. Even if it's getting a little bit moldy, I'll cut it off. It's all going to go into a pot of soup. But even with a great effort, I believe on my part, so I'm giving myself credit for that. regular spraying, different kinds of sprays, hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, a stronger chemical, it's hard to keep these guys going. So, remove the fruit and then we're going to come back in and I'll show you how to get these back on track so they grow through the disease cycle. You keep things under control and then hopefully middle of August into middle of September, you're getting more tomatoes. Here are four more plants. They're a little bit younger than the other ones. They're not really producing ripe fruit yet. Lots of green fruit on there. This is a brandy wine. Always more prone to disease. They don't look as bad as the other plants. And again, every plant has been sprayed and cared for the same way. Different varieties respond differently to your temperatures, to diseases. So, one thing you want to do is while you're growing tomatoes through the years, take notes on which ones do the best and stick with those. They just might be better for your garden and for your gardening zone. So, you know, beat up. Again, I do leave the leaves on there. You can remove them if you want. It really doesn't matter. The fungal spores are on the leaves. That's what you want to clean off, you know, and you're killing them on the leaves that are already dead. You know, it's up to you what you want to do. But the spread isn't coming because I left the leaves on there is my point. It's just, you know, I just can't keep up on it. I might have to spray every day with hydrogen peroxide and put on the baking soda spray every day for like a 10-day period when you have all this crazy rain and humidity, but I don't have time for that. So, the plants suffer. But, we're going to get them back on track. These will will be producing, I think, nicely middle of August, you know, towards, you know, the first week of September. I just need to get them back on track. This guy is a Brandy Wine Red. it probably won't make it. But for plants that look like this, really beat up and the Brandy wine again, those that variety is really susceptible to diseases. So the fruit on here I left on obviously too long. And you can see that the beetles are getting to it. A plant knows. I mean, look at that. It's kind of gross. A plant knows when it has fruit on its vines. So, what I'm going to do is remove everything from this plant. Again, I I'll go over the spraying routine to get these back on track, the feeding routine. But now, this plant has no fruit. And a plant wants to reproduce. It wants to grow fruit, grow seeds, and then, you know, send the seeds to the ground. Some more plants come in the joints. There are some nice suckers growing, which will turn into production stems, and they're going to be producing fruit. As the cycle of the fungus that are is attacking these tomato plants goes away, when the temperatures change or the life cycle changes, this plant will come back. Now that we're in mid July, if I take care of them, they will actually spring back. We'll see how this guy does. There's a couple of, you know, again, there's the suckers in the joints. And I think they're going to be okay. The top of the plant looks okay. Anyway, the whole idea is to really hit them with a high nitrogen fertilizer when they're like this, water soluble. It's going to get the leaves growing. We remove the fruit. We'll get back to spraying and we'll see how they do. The plants in here are a determinant variety tomato plant. So, they produced a whole lot. And you can see that I've missed getting to some of them. This plant you can't really save. It's doing what it's supposed to do. Produce a bunch of tomatoes. Here's the same variety over here. These are all going to go and be turned into sauce. Now, I'm not sure you'd call this the great tomato harvest. This is what came out of the garden with all the plants that have been pretty damaged by the fungi. Picked up some onions from the garden, some garlic, some basil. This is all going to be turned into sauce and some cucumber tomato salad. And I've harvested a lot over the last two or three weeks. So, this is pretty nice. And my point being that even if your garden gets beat up or you feel like it fails 50% of the time, you still end up with really nice production. Even when the plants are really beat up and you know, this is just proof of that. Nothing wrong with that. Plenty of tomatoes to last for a while. It's going to make a beautiful big pot of sauce. Now, the next step really is to figure out how to get these plants back on track. Here in Maryland, zone 7, frost isn't going to come until October. So, if I can get these back on track, they'll start producing and ripening again middle of August, and I'll get another good four weeks, five weeks worth of tomatoes coming out of my garden. All right, so here's how you save your tomato plants. July 18th. Lots of heat here, humidity, everything I've been talking about. It's going to be 92 plus, like 33 Celsius, higher. You know, it's getting up to that 95 degrees, almost 100, I don't know, 36° C. We're going to put down a shade cloth. I've done a video on that. I will link it in the video description. Shade cloth is going to keep the plant cooler. It's going to help it really just grow and survive when it gets really hot and more specifically the soil gets hot from the sun beating down on there. It can slow down production, slow down your plant. They basically go into, you know, standby mode waiting for the right temperatures. You can also put down mulch, keep the soil nice and moist, water regularly three times a week. The plant will survive, do better. Now, I took off most of the tomatoes. I'm leaving the leaves on there. You can cut them back if you want. I really found over the years, it doesn't matter because everything is going to get sprayed. Gonna spray this with hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide, I will link that video, more details about H2O2 in the video description. Hydrogen peroxide will clean the leaf. It goes on the leaf, does its thing, and it's off, let's just say within 24 hours. It doesn't stay on there as a prevention. I'm using 8 ounces of hydrogen peroxide in one gallon of water or 8 ounces in 3.7 L of water. That's a higher amount than I normally use, but I've been testing it out. The plants do fine with it. Typically, you would use 4 to 6 ounces for maintenance, 6 to 8 ounces for an outbreak and test spray. If you've not used it before, you have to spray some leaves, wait 48 hours. If no damage occurs, go ahead and use your spray. And you should do that for really for any plant. So, I'm going to clean the leaves first. And we're going to be getting rain tonight. We're going to be getting rain tomorrow. So, putting down baking soda spray, an organic antifungal, isn't really going to make a difference because the rain is going to wash it off. Hydrogen peroxide comes and goes, cleans the leaf. The baking soda spray stays on the leaf, creates an environment the fungus does not like, the fungi does not like, and it prevents the fungus from reproducing and going forward. So, it stays on the leaf, until a rain comes. So, we're using H2O2 and baking soda spray. I won't be putting that on until the rain goes away. That'll be two days. First thing, let me turn I just got this electric um sprayer. I'll be doing a video on that if you want to subscribe and follow me. I want to test it out a little bit more. But it's amazing. It was under 40 bucks. Nice spray. And I'm just going to go in and soak the entire plant. The battery powered sprayers are amazing. And I would just go through and it looks, you know, just like that. I'm just going in and soaking it really well. You want to coat the leave the leaves with the hydrogen peroxide spray. Again, this will be done in about 24 hours. It's gone. And then the baking soda spray will go in there. The baking soda spray, I have a videos on that, too. But it's one to two tablespoons in a gallon or 3.7 um lers of water, cover the leaves. That's going to be what I'm using to really manage the fungus because temperatures and weather and rain has just been terrible. Everything I've been trying to do isn't keeping the plants as I wish, but it certainly slowed them down. And you saw, you know, I still got plenty of tomatoes. The next thing I want to do because there's so many leaves beat up and I don't remove my leaves. Again, I found it really doesn't make a difference. I'm going to hit this with a water-soluble fertilizer. This is where I would recommend using the chemical types. Everything is a chemical, but chemical type and that people made it. It's that 24816 water-soluble fertilizer high in nitrogen. That's what your plant needs right now to recover. You want more leaf growth. So, I'm using a combination of Agrothrive and organic water soluble and plant expert. Mix the ratio however you want. Don't need to be perfect. It's what I'm doing is half strength um plant expert half strength agro thrive and that's what I'm going to give them. I'm watering the base. I'm going to just show you how much I'm giving them. Water the base nicely about 5 seconds and then come out to where the other roots are and just soak it down. That's probably almost a half a gallon of water soluble fertilizer. The water soluble means that the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are are immediately available to the plant. They can use it right away. It's going to be absorbed into the roots. It's going to go to the plant and it's going to green up and grow quicker. Now, that's the basic setup. Day two, I'm going to hit this again with the 8 ounces of hydrogen peroxide in a gallon of water. You can use less the second day. You go to 4 ounces if you want. Really depends on what you want to do. Just to make sure the leaf is clean again. And then I'm going to spray this with the baking soda spray. That's it. You can you don't have to use the baking soda spray. You can pick any antifungal that you want to use, but the antifungal is what stays on the leaf and prevents the fungus from coming. That's the basic setup. Please subscribe and follow me and I'll show you how these plants recover. Not all of them will recover, but most of them will. So, let me go back and uh spray all these plants and then we'll get to the conclusion. Here's a closeup of suncald again. It's when the sun is just beating down on the skin of the tomato. It's going to discolor it, turns brown, and you can just cut this off and eat it. Also, just wanted to show you like these tomatoes are a little bit past their prime. And you see this, you know, change right here on the flesh. I just cut this off. These will be used as stew tomatoes for making sauce. And you can cut this off and you can chop them up and still use them. So tomato, even this guy, you know, I'll just cut this whole strip off. It will go into the stock pot. I'll make the sauce. The tomatoes don't have to be perfect. They're pretty hardy, actually. Like if you let them go too long, you're going to get the beetles like you saw earlier. But these are really nice tomatoes. Trim them up, put them into the pot, you can still use them. Thanks so much for watching and please subscribe and follow me. I show you a real garden, weeds, problems, but I also teach you how to grow food, have fun, success, save some money. And please check out my seed shop at the rustedgarden.com. I sell tomato and pepper seeds for $1.75 a pack. All other seeds are only $150 a pack. Again, thanks so much for watching.