Blossom end rot

Many of my container plants have one or two fruit with BER. This includes a few cross-pollinated fruit; since BER tends to affect early-forming fruit, it's not surprising it is a problem with some of my early cross attempts.   Bummer though.  Historically I have not had enough BER to really be a problem.  Although the conventional wisdom all says it's a calcium transport problem, there is really nothing much to be done about it.   Apparently it's increased by both over- and under-watering, and over- and under-fertilizing.  !  Good luck figuring that one out.   Calcium sprays are widely recommend for use on the foliage, but it's not clear that this really does any good.   Also, supplementing calcium in the soil may not help much because the problem is not necessarily lack of Ca in the soil.  

The problem is supposedly caused by excess transpiration through leaves, which diverts calcium away from the developing fruit.   This may explain why excess nitrogen is bad, because this stimulates foliage development.  Actually my container plants are kicking ass in terms of foliage, but the fruit set is actually not that amazing.  This all seems related to excess fertilizer/nitrogen.  

More wilt

By now, I think every tomato plant in the bales is affected by wilt to a greater or lesser degree.  I have tried to aggressively prune affected branches on plants. This may have stalled it on a few plants, for a few weeks; for some of them, that may make the difference in getting mature fruit before the plant dies.

I think there are two types of wilt going on.  (1) The first is characterized by classic signs of wilt : drooping leaves at top of plant, asymmetrically affecting different sides or stems on the plant, and yellowing of leaves at the bottom of the plant.  The yellow leaves do not wilt right away.  (2) The second kind of wilt has similar top-wilt symptoms but instead of turning yellow, the leaves turn wilted first, droopy/crumpled up and greenish-brown.  It's a "wet" sort of wilting, not dry and crispy.

Seems like various bugs cause similar symptoms because they are all causing problems by clogging up the plant's vascular system.  Fusarium, verticillium, and "bacterial" wilt are all similar.  However the first is a fungus, the second is bacteria, and the third is a different bacteria - Ralstonia solanacearum.   Also, different "races" of Fusarium apparently exist.   

None of the 13 tomato plants in my containers have any signs of wilt.  

There are about a half dozen sporting tomato plants growing in the bales too.  Clearly, the bales got "well inoculated" with my homemade compost, which was teeming with tomato seeds!  These sports are less affected by wilt.  Perhaps this is just because they are younger, having germinated in (probably) early May.   I'll let 'em grow and see what happens.

Here was my initial bale planting setup:

bales = CA+MS ; WB+BC; HC+HC; FL+FL;  SG +  F4 #55A-7

Here's how each is doing as of 6/30/18.

CA:  Has wilt #2. Good fruit set.  Only part of the plant is affected by wilt. Plant still is somewhat healthy.

MS:  Killed by Wilt #1. Pulled it out on 6/23. 
WB:  Plant has grown to about 6 ft height, but fruit set is poor-to-fair (only a few fruit; blossom number low).   Wilt #1 slightly affected.
BC:  The most vigorous bale plant.  8 ft height.  Good fruit set.  Has slight wilt #1 I think.  Probably strong enough to produce a good number of fruit before it gives in.
HC #1: killed by wilt #1. Pulled on 6/20.
HC #2:  Has wilt #1 and going downhill fast now.   Strangely, this one had 2 germinated seeds in the original planting, right next to each other - so I just transplanted them both - but one of them is not HC, it's clearly a beefsteak-y type.  But it's got wilt #1 too.  Not sure if it will make it long enough to ripen fruit.
FL #1: killed by wilt#1, pulled on 6/20
FL #2: good fruit set, still growing, but has wilt #1 to a modest degree.
SG:  Wilt#1 is getting worse.
55A7:  Wilt#2 is getting serious.  This is a bummer because I've got a few cross-pollinated fruit growing and they are not ripe yet.

Farm update

Plants at the farm plot are mostly ok.  It's easier to maintain 24 plants than 100 like last year.  They are not as vigorous as my home bale and container plants, but that's to be expected as they were planted later, and are not coddled.   A few of the heirlooms died (CG, KB, ZPT) , but no big deal .

Seems like the 8A subline is not really purple.  However, 10B is!   Can't tell yet if any 10Bs are homozygous for gf.   Most 55As are clearly very purple, though I can see some variation in intensity.  28D3 is a vigorous cherry, though I can't detect purple on any. :(

Soon I will have to give these plants F4 identifiers. e.g. 55A-7-1, 55A-7-2, etc.

6/23/18

8A7 

46A2

55A1

55A7

10B1

Another one bites the dust

Mr. Stripey quickly succumbed to the wilt, so I put him out of his misery and pulled him up.  So, three out of 10 tomatoes in bales got bacterial wilt: one HC, one FL and now my only MS.  I'll have to wait till next year to see what that guy's fruit is like.   The MS did not even produce open flowers; some trusses were forming but would probably need another 2 weeks to bloom - about a month later than all the other varieties.

So clearly bales are not a panacea to disease. There are a few possible culprits here in order of my suspicion.  First, I put my own compost on the bales and that was dumb.  Easy to avoid next year.  Second, they have been getting sprayed by my ground irrigation system, so that might have been splashing spores around.  I could deactivate that station on my automated irrigation controller. Third, some of them may have put roots through the bottom of the bale, through the degrading cardboard into the ground.   One possible solution would be to put weed control mat under the cardboard too, to make a better barrier to roots & shoots. Fourth, the bales themselves could already have been contaminated when I bought them, which seems unlikely, and impossible to do anything about really.

On the other hand, the other seven plants are growing mostly great. The surviving FL and HC are OK, do not show signs of wilt and are still growing and producing fruit.     Carbon is doing nicely.  White beauty and BC are growing tall enough that I put 8 foot poles into the bales for more support; these reach about 9 feet off the ground!

Sun Gold had some signs of yellow low branches and a little drooping on one or two secondary stems. I aggressively pruned these off.  As of 6/23 the plant seems OK.


CA+MS ; WB+BC; HC+HC; FL+FL;  SG +  F4 #55A-7;

Flamme... has burned out

Mr. Stripey was not happy.  Two days later it looked awful and I ripped it out.

White Beauty and Black Cherry, together between the wood poles.

Carbon

More Crossing progress

As of today (6/20/18) I have attempted about 40 or so individual flower cross-pollinations.  The first week was sort of lousy because most flowers I used were too early in development I think.  As of June 10 I started using serial numbers.  Of these at least a half dozen are growing fruit already, hooray! And I am pretty sure more will be growing now that I have the hang of it.  Takes about a week to confirm the fruit is maturing.

A few wilting plants .... terminated

Two plants in my bales seem to have bacterial wilt:  wilting from the top down, at first seemingly as if they just needed water on a hot day, but nope.  So after a few days of this, today I just pulled 'em, bagged 'em and threw them in the trash.   These were one HC and one FL, which I note were both prone to wilt last year.  In each bale there is another one of the same type still doing OK.  Interestingly the other FL had some wilting and yellowing bottom branches a week or so ago, which I trimmed off, and now that plant seems pretty good.  I hope the bacterial wilt does not spread.   I am kicking myself because one of the points of bales was to avoid these sorts of contamination - and then what did I do?  I "inoculated" the bales with some of my own compost (because I was trying to help cure the bales).  Which is probably a terrible idea in retrospect because there is at least some old tomato plant material in that compost and god knows what else from my yard.   Duh.

Cross-pollination progress

This year one of my goals was to master tomato cross-pollination.   Having a dozen different healthy plants in containers on my back patio is a big help.

I started emasculating flowers on June 3, but by about June 10 I was wondering if I was focusing on flower buds that were too immature; turns out I was.  Here's a good link to a guide from UC Davis on tomato cross-pollinating that talks about this subject in detail:

https://tgrc.ucdavis.edu/Guidelines_Emasculating_and_Pollinating_Tomatoes.pdf

Starting around June 10, I focused on flowers that are probably at just the right stage, which is about 1 day before they really open.  This seems to be working to some extent.  I also am giving crossed flowers serial numbers.  By June 16, I could tell that at least a couple of these attempted crosses were growing fruit.    Seems like most of the ones I tried before June 10 obviously failed, or no evidence of success, at any rate.   As of June 19 I am beyond serial number 25 in my crosses.

Why do more crosses? Well why not?  It would be interesting to bring the stripe gene into my IRxCP lines, so I am crossing Pink Berkeley Tie Die to 46A2 and 55A7.   Also of interest, would be to cross Flamme or KB to RT, GDZ or even ZPT to make a yellow fruit with interesting shape.

Finally I am crossing RT to GDZ to test if they fail to complement.  This is tricky since if they fail to complement I expect the "lumpy" phenotype to be similar to either parent, which is probably identical to self-fertilization.   Since this could happen by accident I am hoping to get several crossed fruits so I can validate independently generated F1s (i.e., seeds from different individual fruits).  That would be more convincing than following seeds from a single fruit.

Stakes up

This year I have staked each plant in the farm plot.  With fewer than 30 plants, and more T-posts than that left over from last year, it was easier.  
So far most of the plants at the farm plot survived transplant and are on their way.