![]() Prune your plants to improve air circulation, and don’t plant your tomato plants too close together. Promote good drainage and prevent pooling of surface water around your plants. If you can keep the surface of the soil dry, you have a good chance of preventing the sclerotia from germinating. Plant in fresh soil to lessen the risk of possible infection. If you grow your tomato plants in containers, sterilize the pots before using them again. Options include a solution of 10 percent bleach, 70 percent rubbing alcohol, or an activated oxygen product called BioSafe Disease Control that is available from Arbico Organics. Make sure your gardening tools are clean! If that’s not possible, consider planting in containers or raised beds, using fresh soil. Note that the sclerotia can survive deep in the soil for up to 10 years. Rotate your crops and avoid planting in soil known to be contaminated with this pathogen for at least five years. What’s the most important factor in terms of cultural control in this case? Location, location, location, as they say. ![]() Given the wide host range of this pathogen, it is particularly important to double down on removing any weeds found in or near your garden. When conditions are favorable, it is a good idea to inspect your plants periodically and remove and destroy any that show symptoms of this disease. Unfortunately, no resistant varieties of tomatoes are available currently, though genetic testing of resistance to this pathogen is underway. There are some techniques you can use to minimize infection of your plants. Water can spread spores or sclerotia, and irrigation water is a common source of infection in commercial fields. The wind can also blow soil or crop debris infested with sclerotia into your garden. If successful, the fungus will then produce sclerotia, which can spread the disease further in your garden. The most common way that timber rot is spread is by spores that blow through the air from infected crops or weeds, and land on your unfortunate plants. How Your Garden Can Become Infested with Timber Rot However, you are stuck with those sclerotia in the soil – a harbinger of doom for your tomato plants. The only good thing about this disease is that once it has completed its disease cycle, it will not produce spores until the next year when favorable conditions return. Once the pathogen has become established in decaying tissue, it moves on to attack the healthy parts of plants. This is often the case in leaf axils where a flower blossom has fallen and become stuck. The spores typically germinate on susceptible tissue such as dead flowers. These can survive on a leaf for up to two weeks under favorable conditions. The fruiting bodies produce spores right above the soil line that are very sticky. You may be able to see these – they look like little mushrooms on the surface of the soil. Once conditions are cool and favorable for the fungus, the sclerotia within the top inch or two of soil germinate and produce fruiting bodies. ![]() If the environment is warm and dry, the sclerotia can stay in the soil for years – as infectious as ever. The plants are most susceptible when they are blooming, so pay particular attention to the flowers if the weather is cool and wet. Spores are most likely to infect tomato plants after 16-72 hours of continuous wetness with a relative humidity that is greater than 90 percent. Nighttime temperatures around 60☏ are particularly favorable for infection. ![]() White mold is a disease of cool, wet weather – temperatures from 59 to 70☏. If you cut the sclerotia open, their insides are pinkish-white. The tissues become even more bleached and brittle, and in seven to 10 days, the black sclerotia are formed. The fruit can also be infected, turn gray, and rot.Īs the disease progresses, the plant will wilt. It then spreads to the flowers, petioles, leaves, and stems. Next, a white fuzzy mold grows both inside and outside the plant. At first, the disease manifests as watery soft rots and bleached areas on the leaf axils and stems. The first sign of infection by this pathogen is at the base of the main stem at the soil line or on lower branches. This symptom in tomatoes gives the disease its alternate name, timber rot. You can find them inside tomato tissue that has turned white and dry due to the disease. The sclerotia form in or on dead plant tissue. These survival structures look like rat droppings – small, black, hard, cylindrical objects. How Your Garden Can Become Infested with Timber RotĪ classic symptom of this disease is the production of structures called sclerotia that give the organism its scientific name.
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