[Music] welcome to the rusted garden homestead this video is all about how do you manage down fungal issues on your tomato plants so that you can continually get a harvest all season long first thing you have to be able to do and I'll show you how to do that is identify the fungal issues when they show up on your plants what are you looking for then we're going to go over four chemical sprays three of them are are organic one of them is not remember all things are chemicals when you notice that you have the fungus starting that's when you want to start spraying spraying regularly is what's going to manage the fungus which is going to manage the tomato disease and it will allow you to really raise that plant the entire season and get a nice long harvest off your tomato plants before we get started two important things it doesn't really matter what spray you pick the effectiveness of the spray is really based on how often you use them so the gardener has to have a good routine for treating their tomato plants when you pick a spray it's really important that you test spray whatever you pick you know if it's something I suggest or a recipe that I use or if you buy something from a store always spray some of the leaves you know a couple of them wait 48 hours look to see if there's any damage if there's no damage write down how you made the mix and use that reg regularly in your garden it's really important that you test spray don't go out and cover everything and then you get damage from the spray and then you're going to be upset so test spray and probably the third thing I would actually add is just because you have a fungal issue on your tomato plant doesn't mean you need to go over to your pepper plants over there start spraying them spin around go over and spray all your blackberries and blueberries most fungal issues affect a specific plant and you can get different fungal issues on peppers and blackberries and all that but when you they show up on a tomato plant they're really you know just being hosted by the tomato plants so you only have to spray the tomato plants don't go and spray your entire garden it's a waste of time and it's just not good practice it's really important that you're able to identify fungal issues that show up on your tomato plants you don't need to know the name most fungal issues are treated the exact same way with a spray we'll talk about those four different sprays later in the video when a leaf spot shows up when a fungal issue shows up you're going to be looking on the leaves and you're looking for something like this let's get it in focus and you see all the spots see the yellow halo around them when you have the yellow halo that means the fungal issue no matter what it is is active and when you spray after a couple of days you should see spots still on the leaves but the yellow halo will be gone and that's how you know that the fungus is no longer active so when you're looking at your plants you're really looking for patterns like this and again notice the yellow around them that means the fungus is alive and with time it'll reproduce and it's going to move and work its way up the tomato plant i'm not too worried about that leaf because my tomatoes have been sprayed you get the septtorial leaf spot you can get different kinds of anthrachnos which are all like imperfect fungi from what I understand early blight the fungal issue is all treated pretty much the same way with an antifungal spray looking at all these leaves they're nice and green they look good last week we had cooler temperatures 40° nights upper 40s lots of rain and it was just cooler for this period of time here in Maryland zone 7 so Septura leaf spot was at risk so I sprayed all my plants early spraying early is what's going to allow you to manage down the damage from these diseases let's look at some more leaves these are some leaves that I cut off of this tomato plant earlier and well let's get in here break this one off get it in focus you can see some spots on there there's a little bit of yellowing around there that's still an active fungus although I sprayed or because I sprayed I'm not really worried about that and leaves that I took off from the bottom you can see you know they were active that pattern is the fungus an active fungus this pattern when you see dots like this that's from an insect notice how that they're light tan when you look at the unders sides looks like the bottom of the leaves is were chewed out that's from an insect i'll do future videos on that but that damage really isn't worrisome again want to stress because this is what freaks people out it's when you see the dots they're brown circles actually circles within circles within circles concentric circles and a yellow halo you have an active fungus just trying to get a real nice closeup so you can see what that active yellow halo really looks like now that you understand what you're looking for here is a tomato plant that I'm actually not pruning i'm just letting it grow and please subscribe and follow me i'll be doing a whole video on this plant what happens if you don't prune a tomato plant now you prune basically to manage size and manage diseases so in most of my plants I remove the bottom leaves to allow air flow in and reduce disease i'm leaving the leaves in here this plant was just sprayed so I'm not too worried about it but you can see all the fungal issues that are active the other thing that's interesting as a tomato plant grows if it doesn't have enough water and nutrition or it needs something it takes it from the bottom leaves so the bottom leaves often get weaker and they're more susceptible to insect and pest damage and also to diseases latching on so most of your diseases start at the bottom and they work their way up let's get a closeup of that and you can see and you can see sort of the circles within circles it's hard to see with this video but it's brown circles within brown circles rings within rings within rings creates that yellow halo this is all a fungal issue all going to be managed with spraying now typically what you do is you come out you spray your tomato plant let's go back to the regular view and then you remove the bottom leaves get rid of the disease put the sprays on your plant your tomato plant's going to be fine you're not going to be able to eliminate fungal issues but with a little practice some journaling and learning what comes to your garden you're going to be able to use sprays to take care of the problem so we have uh three chemical sprays organic you have wetable sulfur baking soda and copper fungicide all organic everything's a chemical by the way to use the baking soda sprays and the wetable sulfur sprays it's 1 to two tablespoons per gallon of water you don't need any soap mix it up and then you spray the unders sides of the leaves and the top of the leaves and you want to do that every seven to 14 days based on rain it's not waterproof it will wash off and if it rains a lot you're going to just have to reapply it what happens is the baking soda when you spray that onto the plant and again the baking soda is 1 to two tablespoons per gallon of water when you spray it on the leaves it changes the pH of the leaf it makes it inhospitable to the fungus it actually raises it it makes it more alkaline and then the fungus just can't reproduce doesn't stay on the leaves and you get it under control wetable sulfur works in the same way except it lowers the pH of the leaf it makes it more acidic and then when you spray the sprays on the leaf the fungus may land on there the spores may land on there but it's not the right pH like naturally um the leaf pH is what the spore wants by changing it by raising it with baking soda or lowering it with wetable sulfur you make it a place where the fungus just doesn't want to live so it doesn't spread through the rest of your your plant as soon as you see the spots get your sprays out stay on a routine if you have an outbreak I would be spraying every 5 to 7 days if you're just maintaining a plant that's clean every 10 to 14 days that's the wetable sulfur spray and the copper or the wetable sulfur spray and the baking soda spray here's the active fungus and let me show you one that's no longer active the sprays took care of it here's an example of insect damage i thought I would just throw that in there so that's insect damage that's not caused by a fungus i took off most of the leaves of the plants earlier that had the inactive fungus but you can see right there we have the circles the concentric circles get that into focus what'll happen we have the concentric circles but notice the halo is not there so that is the remains of a fungal issue that's been cleared up using the sprays the next spray is the copper fungicide you can buy it in a concentrate follow the instructions mix into a gallon of water you can just buy a spray bottle spray your plant depends on how many tomato plants you have when you put copper onto the leaves the copper disrupts how the fungus really multiplies and lives and kills it off so within 3 to 5 days of putting down your sprays you're going to see those circles with the yellow halo just turn to brown specks on your leaves brown little circles that means you've controlled the fungus now baking soda spray we all know what baking soda is i have cherry tomatoes like right over there if I spray the baking soda spray on there I don't mind eating the cherry tomatoes even though the wetable sulfur and the copper fungicide is organic I don't want to spray my cherry tomato plants with that because I eat them right off the vine bigger tomato plants or when a fruit's not formed for a while I don't mind using the copper or the uh wetable sulfur you know it's just a choice each spray organic or not is going to have its pros and cons and that's something I recommend you learn about this is one of my cherry type tomatoes it's actually a grape tomato it's a Juliet and it's starting to form really nice clusters of tomatoes because I eat these right off the vine I don't want anything on there organic or not that I'm going to eat so this is typically going to get the baking soda spray or if it has a really bad outbreak I may spray something else i'm going to pick up all the tomatoes then put the spray on and I'm going to wait a while the non-organic spray that I recommend is dacanil danil is a chemical made by people i recommend you research it decide if that's something you want to use in your garden the reason I like that spray is because it's waterproof so before your uh fruit is formed or if you have large uh fruit I don't know why it's so hard for me to say fruit or if you have large fruit that's easy to wash dacanel is not a bad choice because it stays in there throughout the rains it's waterproof and it's going to last a good 14 days so you don't have to spray that you know every two weeks i don't want to use that when I'm really harvesting and if fruits are ripe you know I will go back to baking soda wetable sulfur or the copper spray it doesn't matter which spray you pick that's the point that I wanted to stress what matters is that you actually inspect the plants identify when the fungus issues are there or you spray preventatively or a combination of both and you just stick to a routine of spraying that's what's going to manage down the damage that comes from the fungus that affects your tomato plants and that will allow you to have a harvest all year long when it comes to diseases on your tomato plants if it's a fungus you can't really stop them from showing up but you can manage down the damage so that you really don't lose any plants and again you have to just keep up on it and keep the sprays coming out regularly throughout the growing season different fungi will show up at different times some like cold weather some like warm weather so keep a log make a journal and just jot down when these different fungal issues show up on your tomato plants and please check out my seed shop i sell tomato and pepper seeds for $1.75 a pack all other seeds are $150 and please subscribe i'll teach you how to grow food save money and have some fun again thanks so much for watching