Sick Tomato Plant

I planted 2 Super Sweet 100 plants about 12 feet apart and one is growing like crazy while the other did well for about a month, got to about 3' tall, then wilted and looked very sick. The other has grown to about 7' tall.
Many of the leaves on the sick plant turned brown and I clipped them off.
It already had about 8 tomatoes on it and they are ripening, and finally it seems to be coming back since I see new flowers and it just looks better.
I don't know what went wrong with the plant, it is closer to the next house and might have gotten some overspray - not sure just a guess.

My question is if it is safe to eat the tomatoes from this plant? Is there anything that makes the fruit unsafe?

PeteB7 - the tomatoes from that plant should be fine to eat so long as they're washed, which I know you'd do anyway. I'm not aware of anything like that which could make the fruit unsafe, except for some spray residue possibly being on the outside.

The cause of that plant's distress could be many things. You say it's getting better - so maybe it had a touch of fungus disease earlier which has now improved due to hotter, drier summer conditions. I've had that happen. Overspray from a neighbor's herbicide could have caused the problem - some foliage could wither and die from a light dose, then the plant could overcome it. I have several tomato plants this year that were damaged by moles digging around and causing the roots to dry out earlier in the season. That gave them a setback, but now they've grown to a size that the roots aren't so easily damaged and they've recovered.

Thanks very much! That all makes a lot of sense.

Pete B7...Ozark is correct the tomatoes are safe to eat. As long as you wash them well.

Overspray (herbicide drift) makes the most sense as super Sweet 100 is disease resistant to verticillium wilt (V), fusarium wilt (F), and nematodes (N). Plants tend to recover from herbicide drift once it has metabolized the herbicide.

Early blight and late blight are two diseases that frequently affect tomatoes in the Northeast but it would have been likely that both of your plants would have had the disease as they are of the same variety and close proximity.

Could be grubs in the soil eating the roots or a soil/fertility issue.

Where did you see the dead leaves? Bottom of the plant? top? or one side or the other?

Pete - do you have heavy clay soil? I have parts of my garden where it is hard to get things to grow because the soil holds too much water.

drobarr - The wilt was on the bottom half roughly, both sides, it got worse until they turned brown.
I have put down milky spore back in October and it seems to be working, I don't think our grubs were ever too bad.
There is something odd with the bed that I put them in, the end that grows well is higher and within about 3 feet of a gutter, the other end is at one of the lowest points in the yard. There is something strange with this bed and I was going to start a new thread about it with pictures. I started weeding it and the high end was fairly normal. The other end looked as if there was grass there and it was flipped over to make it a planting bed, the roots were still there soggy and kind of rotting. But this bed has been here for over 10 years since we moved in so I don't understand why the roots did not decompose. I dug it all up, removed the roots and added fresh top soil about 2 weeks ago.

Honeybee - We have good top soil for about 6 - 7 inches then clay that is mostly graded to the street, but this is a low point in the yard and with very, very heavy rain it does puddle near this sick tomato plant but the plant is about 6 to 10 inches above the level where it puddles.

the roots maybe didnt decompose because there is too much water? and anaerobic? Which might also explan poor tomato growth. If the bottom leaves were yellow there are a few things that can cause that. Over watering, lack of nitrogen(plants will actially translocate nitrogen in the older parts of the plant to the newer growth, or tomato early blight fungal disease.

Yes, I think it was anerobic, it just didn't seem healthy. The tomato plant and a grape vine at that end of the bed have perked up, there is new foliage and flowers on the tomato plant.
We had a strange spring, almost no rain in April then massive rain in May, generally cool until this heat wave started and it is mostly 85 to 95 lately. Many plants do not seem happy with so much heat.

Thanks again drobarr and honeybee! - that is an interesting paper

It has doubled in height and really taken off, amazing how fast these plants grow!

That's good. Since it has stopped raining everyday has helped.