Tomato problems in row one...

[Dumbo]

Pics of a tomato stem

The area between the lines is what is supposed to turn brown if it's a bacteria or virus.

Depending on the nature of the bacteria/virus you have some will be a brown mush, others may not be a mush. They mention nothing about the "white meat pulp" (yeah OGrubber and eeyore will yell at me for calling it "white meat pulp part" instead of some proper big scientific name)

So you would have to slice your plant up length wise and check this.

IMG_1.JPG (52.32 KiB) Viewed 639 times

IMG_2.JPG (48.04 KiB) Viewed 639 times

[DonnaZn2SK]

Marc,

There was no brown mush...I actually cut the stem on the diagonal (cut off the dried up part) and stuck it into some soil. I probably won't get anything off this but if it roots and lives, we'll know it wasn't diseased. I've never had this many issues with tomato plants except when we had late blight in 2010.

[OGrubber]

"white meat pulp part"==> Pith.
Hope that tom sets roots for you Donna.
I hate winds.

[DonnaZn2SK]

Between the stem problem and the winds blowing over the remaining good plants, I am thoroughly discouraged with tomato growing this year. Today, I had to replace three more in the front row, this time I planted them in large pots and plunked them in the same spot. We'll see whether these take...I'm pretty sure there's not enough season left to grow more than one or two tomatoes per plant. Did I mention that on a couple of spots, I've replaced tomatoes three times?

I added alfalfa pellets to the soil this year, which is the only thing I did different, but this doesn't explain the poor performance only in the first row.

[Dumbo]

Any type of mulch in the garden? Read that some mulches can cause this. But, doesn't make sense that only the outer ones would be affected....

Notice any crop circles in the area?

[Mygrandmeresgarden]

I had to replace two more in the front (none in the back)...it doesn't look like cutworm to me. It looks like the stem is drying up and then the plant topples. I suspect something might be in the soil that is doing this, but it doesn't explain why it is isolated to the one area.
As you can see, the top foliage is healthy, no spots or blemishes, only the stem is affected.

Im wondering more if you had a lot of rain? Too much rain has killed some of my plants...

[Dumbo]

Yeah this one stumped me. I spent a couple of hours try to track this one down to no avail.

Would really need to see the entire root system to see what's going on there. But (w/o looking back at every post), I think she said it just broke off, so we don't get to see it all.

The root itself, from the broken plant, does look like too much water. BUT, the woodiness of the plant stem doesn't collaborate this.

Need more info.

This bugs me that I can nail this one.