The Wall of Waters are all off the tomatoes now. I used Companion fungicide as a drench. They got a little wet in the Wall of Waters and I wanted to make sure they wouldn’t come down with early blight while gone on my trip. I also sprayed on the foliage Serenade, which is a foliar fungicide. So one end gets the drench and the other end gets the foliar spray. I figure if you zap them both ways, I should have better protection. When I came back,  all looked good except one which was diseased so I tossed it in the garbage, not the compost. Don’t leave diseased plants in the ground to possibly pass on diseases to healthy plants. Then I staked them all up with bamboo stakes and tied up the branches. I cut off any branches that touched the ground so as to not spread any soilborne diseases. Next I had to redefine my wells and put straw over the well to conserve water, help with evaporation and keep soilbourne diseases from splashing up on the tomato plants. Afterward I decided to sterilize my tomato cages since I had some loss due to diseases last year. Might be overkill but I want to be cautious this year before I put them over this year’s tomatoes-don’t want to spread any diseases. I used a 10% solution in a gallon of water (that’s about 1 .75 cup bleach to one gallon water) and sprayed my cages with a hand sprayer. Now I need to put the cages over the tomato plants and start picking off suckers that are showing up. Arrgh, a gardener’s work is never done…

All this work for this..

Virginia Sweet Tomato