Whiteflies: The Cloud That Rises When You Brush the Plant
Brush a tomato plant and a pale cloud lifts off the underside of the leaves, hovers for a second, then settles right back down. That’s whiteflies.
Stink Bugs: Pale Cloudy Patches Under the Skin of a Ripe Tomato
Those pale, cloudy patches sitting just under the skin of an otherwise ripe tomato are almost always stink bug feeding damage.
Spider Mites: Stippled Leaves and Fine Webbing in the Leaf Joints
Fine speckling across the top of tomato leaves, a faint bronze or dusty cast when you step back, and tiny threads of webbing tucked into the spot where…
Cutworms: The Seedling Felled at Soil Level Overnight
A tomato seedling standing tall at dusk, lying severed at the soil line by morning: that’s the signature of a cutworm.
Gray Mold on Tomatoes: The Fuzz That Follows a Wound
Gray fuzz clustered around a pruning cut, a broken stem, or a spent flower is almost always Botrytis cinerea, the fungus known as gray mold.
Southern Blight: The White Fan at the Base of the Stem
Southern blight is serious and it moves fast. The telltale sign is a white, fan-shaped mat of fungal threads spreading across the stem right at the soil…
Bacterial Speck: Tiny Black Dots With a Yellow Halo
Bacterial speck shows up as pinpoint black lesions, each ringed by a narrow yellow halo, scattered across young leaves and green fruit.
Bacterial Canker: One-Sided Wilting and Bird’s-Eye Spots on the Fruit
One-sided wilting paired with small tan spots ringed in white on green fruit points to bacterial canker, caused by Clavibacter michiganensis subsp.
Tomato Mosaic Virus: Mottled Leaves That No Spray Will Fix
Mottled leaves in patches of light and dark green, some puckering, some narrowing into strap-like shapes: that combination points to Tomato Mosaic Virus.
Watering Through a Dry Spell in Yukon
In Yukon, watering through a dry spell means supplementing a genuinely modest summer rainfall rather than fighting off heat.