Aloha!
What is this? How should I treat it (if I can)?
Background: I live in the rainforest of Volcano, Hawai'i (4,000 ft ASL, ~150" rain/year, summer highs around 78F). As you can guess, tomatoes are really hard to grow here! A few months ago we built a lovely greenhouse and my tomatoes were so happy! The top half of the greenhouse is clear plastic while the bottom half is a super find mesh fabric, which holds in a lot of heat but allows for some airflow. The greenhouse typically heats up to 80-100F during the day. At night temps can dip down into the mid-40s to low-50s.
I went out of town for a few weeks and came back to this terrible blight. It has been a famously wet couple of months (we were getting about 1" rain/hour for several day the past month) and high winds, so the greenhouse was being kept closed most days.
When I first got home, I sprayed everything in the greenhouse with a neem oil/dish soap/water mix. I've since repotted a few of the tomatoes that didn't have much mildew/fungus and pruned back all effected areas. I also treated them with a heavy spritzing of Hydrogen Peroxide/Water mix.
Ideas?
by Existing_Summer
1 Comment
This looks like heat stress from being in a closed greenhouse with added damage from the neem oil and dish soap spray.
Sorry to say, I’m not sure they can be saved. Probably be best to buy some new starts from a nursery instead of germinating new seeds because of time considerations.
Sorry for your predicament. I’m sure it is discouraging.