10% of crop dead/ dying. Starts with a yellowing of the lower leaves, wilting, then falls over dead- presumably as the living tissue at the bottom of the stem has rotted away.
Very sandy, Perth basin soil. with a bit of organic matter but not enough. Water goes straight through, so water logging not a problem. Neither is compaction.
Very alkaline soil 8-8 5. Not ideal.
Help much appreciated. What is it? How to stop and prevent?
Thankyou
Well, it looks like your plant is suffering from a type of wilt such as fusarium wilt, southern blight, verticillium wilt, bacterial wilt, and whatever else is out there. Whichever one it is, you have to destroy the plants and not in the compost. Bag it up and throw it out. The disease is in the soil from what I read, so you need to rotate your crops. You may try to find varieties that are resilient to these wilts.
If you want to try to identify which specific wilt you have, you could try to read up on the small differences that some of these diseases have or if you have a university program in Australia, maybe they can ID it.
Fusarium and Phytophthora are the most common root rots that we find on tomatoes. I found a link that may prove useful for your area
Trichoderma sp. is a type of fungus that is being used to control the spread of verticillium, armillaria, and phytophthora. I think that it was originally developed in New Zealand and we use it here in the PNW US. You may want to do some searches on Trichoderma use to control tomato root rot/ phytophthora as I know that there has been research on potatoes
as Loretta says you need to dispose of all of the debris good luck
awesome, thankyou for that information. I will follow up on the fungal treatment. i'm also trying to treat with compost teas.
