To prune tomato plants, use clean, sharp cutters, and make clean cuts against the main stem of the mother plant. Prune out sucker growth, mildew or fungus fr…
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Question by Linda: What do I do for tomato plants with leaves dying from the bottom?
I am a novice gardener and the leaves on my tomato plants are dying from the bottom up and my squash plants are putting out squash, but get soft and shrievel up. I have a raised garden this year. What can I do for these problems?
Best answer:
Answer by Freedom
This time of year the bottom leaves of the tomato plants are no longer needed so just prune the dying ones off. It is always best to remove any leaves below the lowest flowering branch.
Don’t know what to do about the squash though. Here is a star. Maybe someone else will have the answer.
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If they are yellowing from the bottom up, and curling slightly up, rather than down, on the edges, that’s a classic symptom of overwatering. If they are planted in the ground, a deep watering once a week should be enough.
If the leaves are getting brown spots first, and then yellowing and dying, you could have a fungal problem. Making sure you are not getting the leaves wet when you water helps, and also cutting off all the leaves within 12 inches of the soil as they grow will help soil-borne spores from splashing up onto the leaves when it rains.
You’re in luck – I just gardened for the first time this year, also, and grew both of those veggies. I ran into the exact same problems, and here’s what I found:
The tomato is nothing to worry about. Mine did that, too, and I got worried that it was a disease and pulled the leaves/stems off from the bottom. Fortunately, it didn’t hurt the plant, but then I left the rest on, and that didn’t hurt the plant, either, so I think those are no big deal. If you cap the tops of the plants (cut the growing stems to force them to put plant energy into tomato production, rather than added height), then it seemed to help my bottom leaves to stop dying, too.
The bad news is: the squash needs fertilized. Manually. The ones you are seeing are sort of the equivalent of unfertilized chicken eggs — they start to grow, but stop at about 2 inches and go no further, if they don’t get fertilized. Bees usually do this naturally, but we don’t have a lot of those in our area, so sometimes you have to do it by hand.
The way you do that is this: Go out in the mornings when the blossoms are open. There will be male (single-stamen in the middle of the flower) and female (flower with multiple mass of heads). The easiest way is to just pick one of the males, strip off his petals so that only the stamen remains, and dab the stamen on the center pollen receptor clusters in each of the female flowers (you can also tell which are female by the fact that they generally have a bulb just below the base of the flower, and that’s what later becomes the squash). Those will really ramp up your squash production, and you should see ready-to-pick fruits in 2 weeks or so — maybe less!
The problems you are having are usually a result of the soil being too dry. Keep your plants well watered.