Early BLS symptoms appear on lower leaves. Photo courtesy of the author.
Tomatoes are among the most notoriously difficult vegetable species to grow in Florida. Even when you do everything right (choose disease resistant varieties, buy clean seed/healthy transplants, plant early, rotate crops, scout for insects, prune and support vines, etc), things can go wrong in a hurry. Bacterial Leaf Spot (BLS) caused by the pathogen Xanthomomas perforans, is one of those things. BLS often hitches a ride into gardens undetected on seed and transplants and presents itself as warm and humid weather arrives in late April/early May. Outbreaks typically happen in concurrence with the frequent heavy rainstorms that accompany these months and quickly wreak havoc on tomato plants.
BLS occurrence, much worse in some springs than others, has exploded this year in home gardens. First noticed on the plant’s lower leaves, BLS pathogens enter through natural openings in leaves called stomata, manifest as small, “water-soaked” leaf lesions and then develop within days into dark circular spots, sometimes surrounded by a yellow halo. As conditions worsen, all these individual infections cause a general yellowing or “blighting” of entire leaves. Though the issue begins on tomato leaves, BLS can affect all parts of the plant, including stems, flowers and fruit too! It’s at this point, when blighted leaves become obvious and lesion developing on flower stalks cause both flowers and small fruit to drop, that most home gardeners notice that something is up.
Advancing progression of BLS with “blighted” leaves. Photo courtesy of the author.
Unlike with many other pathogens, gardeners don’t have an abundance of options to control BLS. However, taking the following preventative measures can reduce the pathogen’s impact and stave off disease progression until ripe fruit can be harvested.
Don’t irrigate overhead. Utilize drip/microirrigation or hand water beds and containers at soil level. This prevents the leaves from becoming wet; wet leaves become a perfect host for BLS.
Never work tomato plants when leaves are wet. No staking, pruning, tying, or anything else until plant tissue is dry. Working wet tomato plants is an excellent way to spread bacteria!
Sanitize pruning tools often and wash hands after working infected plants.
Maintain airflow in plants by planting at correct spacing and thinning interior leaves as necessary to facilitate quicker drying of the plant.
Prune lower leaves to at least 12” from the soil’s surface to prevent disease transmission from soil to leaves through splashing water.
Remove infected leaves (when plants are dry!) to slow disease progression.
Rotate crops and destroy infected plants to prevent buildup of BLS organisms in soil.
BLS lesions on tomato flowers. Photo courtesy of the author.
Preventative measures are best, but if your garden has a history of BLS and local weather forecasts call for warm/wet/humid weather, it is best to spray fungicides proactively to protect your crop. A weekly spray with a tank mixture of copper and mancozeb is effective at keeping BLS at bay. This is the only chemical spray combination proven to be effective in controlling BLS.
Unlike many common tomato pathogens that can be reliably avoided through planting resistant cultivars like ‘Big Beef’, ‘Celebrity’ and others, no varieties are resistant to BLS.
While BLS is an extremely destructive pathogen of both home and commercially grown tomatoes, growers can lessen the disease’s effects by following the preventative measures outlined above and spraying with a copper/mancozeb mix if necessary. Growing tomatoes this year hasn’t been easy, but it’s worth it to fight back and realize a harvest despite difficulties like BLS!
If bacteria have given you the blues or other garden issues are bringing you down, give your local UF/IFAS County Extension Agent a call! We’re here to help you be successful in all your horticultural endeavors. Happy gardening!
Never one to be satisfied growing “standard” vegetable varieties, last year I decided to peruse various seed sources in search of a superior yellow summer squash selection. Plain ‘Yellow Crookneck’ just wasn’t doing it for me anymore. After doing a little research and consulting a friend who works for Johnny’s Selected Seeds, I settled on a straightneck variety called ‘Multipik’.
Developed in the 1980’s by Harris Seed and now sold by many seed purveyors, ‘Multipik’ enjoyed immediate popularity with commercial squash growers due to its many outstanding qualities but curiously, is just making inroads with the home garden market. Even as it is set to celebrate its 30th anniversary next year, two years of personal experience with ‘Multipik’ verify several important characteristics making it a superior choice to many other traditional summer squash varieties: earliness/heavy yields and a precocious gene.
Newly developing ‘Multipik’ fruit. 4 weeks after planting. Photo courtesy the author.
The longer I garden, the more I’m convinced that earliness to maturity is directly related to yield potential in home gardens, especially in the Panhandle. Lots of varieties have high yield potential but that potential is often at least partially wasted here due to the length of time from seed to harvest. Ideally, you could plant, grow a crop and be done by mid-late June, before intense heat, humidity and all the wonderful garden pests and diseases arrive to destroy spring gardens. Maturing just 50 days from planting, ‘Multipik’ beats that deadline (when planted on time in late March) and yields heavily for at least a month before succumbing to the harsh Panhandle summer. Many traditional summer squash varieties, including ‘Yellow Crookneck’ mature 8-14 days later. While 8-14 days doesn’t sound like much, it can mean a major yield difference when factoring in the almost certain late season pests, diseases, and adverse weather conditions.
The next major advantage ‘Multipik’ offers is a precocious gene, meaning that it will mask symptoms and maintain its yellow color if infected with either Watermelon Mosaic Virus (WMV) or Cucumber Mosaic Virus (CMV), two destructive pathogens commonly affecting squash by discoloring fruit and reducing yield. This trait is critical to commercial growers because yellow squash that isn’t yellow isn’t marketable and is important to home gardeners too as a means to eke out higher yields under virus pressure. While the precocious gene isn’t a cure for either virus, it can help hold them at bay while you harvest! Another quirk caused by the precocious gene is the all-yellow appearance of the fruit, from the peduncle (the stalk holding the fruit to the plant) to the apex! From one end of the fruit to the other, Multipik ensures that when you plant yellow squash, you harvest yellow squash.
‘Multipik’ just days from harvest. Photo courtesy the author.
Whether you are trying to avoid yield loss from late season insect and disease pressure plaguing your traditional squash plantings or just want to try something a little different, I highly recommend planting ‘Multipik’ Squash. This early, disease-resistant cultivar with delicious medium sized, light yellow fruit is sure to be a hit in both in the garden and on the table. As always, if you have any questions about vegetable gardening or any other horticultural topic, give your local UF/IFAS County Extension Office a call! Happy gardening!
There aren’t a lot of quality landscape plant options that fit the description nearly every homeowner desires: native, low-maintenance, slow-growing, pest free, drought tolerant while tolerating wet soils, loving both sun or shade, and green year-round. Needle Palm (Rhapidophyllum hystrix) is the rare plant that checks all those boxes and deserves consideration when adding plants to your landscape!
6 year old Needle Palm in a local landscape. Photo courtesy the author
Needle Palm is an endangered native, growing in a narrow range in the coastal Southeastern US, Calhoun and Liberty counties included. It is primarily found in the understories of wet wooded areas along slopes, ravines, and bottoms; if you’ve ever hiked the Apalachicola Ravines or Torreya State Park trails, you’ve likely encountered Needle Palm in the wild! Being native is nice, but what makes Needle Palm an outstanding landscape option?
Needle Palm is the prettier, more refined cousin of Saw Palmetto (Serenoa repens), which it is sometimes confused with. Unlike the rambling, aggressive, stiff-leaved palmetto, Needle palm possesses “softer”, finely cut, lustrous evergreen leaves, allowing it to add amazing texture to any landscape. Also, unlike palmetto, it doesn’t need a yearly “cleaning” to prune out brown, dead leaves, rather its leaves persist green and clean for many years! You might not want to reach into the interior of a Needle Palm plant anyway, as generally unseen 6-8” namesake “needles” surround the base of its trunk. Needle Palm grows very slowly, eventually reaching 8’ tall or so, but is more often seen in the 4-6’ range in landscapes. This is absolutely a shrub that will never outgrow its welcome. It is a nearly trunkless palm, almost always appearing as a shrub, though with extreme old age it can begin to look a bit like a small tree with a muted trunk. With outstanding aesthetics and a low-maintenance growth habit, Needle Palm has a place in nearly any landscape.
Mature needle palm, 6′ tall and wide. Photo courtesy the author.
In the landscape, Needle Palm does best when sited with some shade in the afternoon but also thrives in full sun. They appreciate regular water during establishment but survive on their own without any extra irrigation after! Needle Palm also doesn’t need much in the way of supplemental fertilization. They do look their best with a light spring application of a general purpose, slow-release fertilizer, but this is not required. Needle Palms are not afflicted with the pest and pathogen problems the much more commonly used non-native Sago Palms (Cycas revlolutas) attracts. I’ve grown Needle Palm for 6 years in the landscape and have never noticed any pest or disease issues. With Needle Palms becoming more common in the nursery trade, I don’t see a place in most landscapes for the inferior, high-maintenance, insect infested Sagos. If you want the tropical, textured look of Sagos, plant Needle Palm instead.
Needle Palm is an extremely attractive, low-maintenance Northwest Florida native plant that you should absolutely seek out and add to your landscape! If you want more information or have any questions about Needle Palm or any other landscape/garden topic, please give your local UF/IFAS County Extension Office a call. Happy Gardening!
There aren’t many more frustrating things than growing seemingly healthy tomatoes, those plants setting an abundance of flower and fruit, and then, once your tomatoes get about the size of a golf ball, having the fruit rot away from the base. This very common condition, called Blossom End Rot (BER), is caused one of two ways: by either a soil calcium deficiency or disruption of soil calcium uptake by the plant. Fortunately, preventing BER from occurring and then realizing an awesome crop of tasty tomato fruit is relatively simple and home gardeners have a couple of possible preventative solution!
Blossom End Rot damage. Photo Courtesy Larry Williams, Okaloosa County Extension.
Soil Test & Lime if Needed. The only way to really know if your soil calcium level is sufficient is through a soil test. A complete soil test through the UF Soil Lab or other lab measures both raw nutrient levels and pH. Testing for pH is especially critical. For calcium, either already in the soil or in a supplement you apply, to be available to tomato plants, soil pH needs to be between 6.0-7. In more “acidic” soil pH below 6, nutrients like iron and aluminum become more available to your tomato plants, outcompeting calcium for uptake into the roots. We don’t want that. If your soil test indicates a pH below 6, it will give a lime recommendation somewhere between 3-5 lbs/100 ft sq of garden area to raise the pH to the sweet spot between 6.0-7.0 where your tomatoes will thrive.
Use a Non-Lime Calcium Supplement. If you’ve had your soil tested and your pH is fine, adding more lime as a calcium supplement isn’t helpful. Using lime as an additional calcium source can actually lift pH above that 6.0-7.0 zone and cause other problems. At this point, once pH is where we want it, I like to add a non-lime calcium supplement. There are lots of options here. Traditional fertilizers labeled for tomatoes and veggies tend to have a good calcium content in the 6-10% range and work great. However, if you’re into organic gardening or just don’t need the extra nutrient value of a complete fertilizer, Gypsum is a good calcium supplement and is widely available. Regardless of which non-lime source you choose, apply at planting or shortly after and follow label rates for best results.
Water Properly. Consistent watering is key in helping ward off BER. Though we know BER is generally
Healthy ‘Big Beef’ tomatoes grown in 2019 with a pH of 6.5, amended with Gypsum at planting, and watered regularly each day! Notice no BER. Photo courtesy the author.
caused by calcium deficiency, it can be induced by creation of distinct wet and dry periods from non-regular watering, interfering with calcium uptake and availability to the plant. So, while you may have adequate soil calcium, if you don’t water correctly, the condition will happen anyway! It’s also good to keep in mind that mature tomato plants use large quantities of water daily, so during the heat of summer, plants in containers may need to be watered multiple times daily to maintain consistently moist soil. Think about it, you don’t drink 8 glasses of water when you wake up and then never drink again throughout a hot day. A tomato is no different. Allowing your plants to wilt down before providing additional water ruins productivity and can induce BER.
Blossom End Rot, while one of the more destructive fates of tomatoes, is totally preventable by a little legwork early in the growing game from you! Soil test and change pH with lime if needed, add a shot of calcium through a tomato blend fertilizer or non-lime supplement like gypsum, and water regularly! Do these three things and you’ll be well on your way to a great crop of early summer tomatoes. If you have any questions about tomato blossom end rot or any other horticulture or agricultural topic, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at the UF/IFAS Calhoun County Extension Office. Take advantage of this beautiful spring weather and get in the garden today! Happy gardening.
