Bacterial canker?

[Salaam]

Hello all,

Is this bacterial canker? What do you recommend I do about it? It's slowly spreading to a few plants. Are there any sprays that work? Does fish emulsion or kelp help strengthen the plants to resist the disease?

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[Seven Bends]

I'm having a hard time seeing the symptoms because the pictures are mostly not in focus. It seems like there are prominent black or brown spots on the flower stalks, is that correct? Are those spots also on the plant stems? I can't really see the state of the leaves, and I'm not sure which leaves go with which plant, except in the last picture where I see some small, dispersed brown spots all over a couple of the leaves. Do other leaves have symptoms? Have you been removing diseased leaves? If there are diseased leaves, pictures would be very helpful for diagnosis. Are there any dark spots on the fruit?

Unless you've removed all the diseased leaves prior to taking the pictures, I don't think this is bacterial canker. The foliage symptoms of bacterial canker are very obvious and distinctive -- browning leaf edges with a prominent yellow border between the dying edge tissue and the healthy green tissue. If you did have bacterial canker, kelp and similar things would not help at all; in fact, nothing would. You would just need to pull all the infected plants ASAP and absolutely don't compost them. Bacterial canker is highly contagious and incurable. But again, I don't think that's what this is, unless those leaf symptoms are present but not in your pictures.

Other spotting disease possibilities would be bacterial spot, bacterial speck, and septoria leaf spot, but it doesn't really look like any of them. All of them have prominent leaf symptoms. Bacterial speck and bacterial spot would be apparent on the fruit (so if you do have black spots on the fruit, look up those two diseases). Septoria would have very obvious leaf spotting, progressing from the lowest leaves upward. It doesn't look like alternaria stem canker, either.

Is it possible this is damage from insect feeding? Or some kind of physical abrasion?

[MissS]

@Salaam I'm not seeing the cracking lesions on the stems that bacterial canker produces. Nor am I seeing the splotching on the tomatoes themselves.
What I do see is that you have some brown specks with yellow rings that need to be further looked at but we need better pics. I suspect that it's early blight but I certainly can not be sure from the images shown here.
Could you please post some images of the diseased foliage and stems?

[Seven Bends]

@Salaam I'm not seeing the cracking lesions on the stems that bacterial canker produces. Nor am I seeing the splotching on the tomatoes themselves.
What I do see is that you have some brown specks with yellow rings that need to be further looked at but we need better pics. I suspect that it's early blight but I certainly can not be sure from the images shown here.
Could you please post some images of the diseased foliage and stems?

@MissS, what do you see that looks like early blight -- which pics? The only foliage spotting I see is in the last pic, near the bottom, and that doesn't look like early blight to me. I think (not sure) the main symptom @Salaam seemed to be trying to show us was the extensive spotting on the flower stems, and I've never seen anything like that from early blight. Clearer pictures and some description will help.

[Salaam]

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[Salaam]

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[Seven Bends]

Based on the new pictures, I'm going to guess you're mainly dealing with bacterial speck. See here for pictures with the same kind of stem/petiole symptoms you have (especially the 8th picture at the link): https://blogs.cornell.edu/livegpath/gal ... of-tomato/

The way to tell will be the spots on the fruit (which you may not have yet, but you probably will soon if not). Read about the fruit spots of bacterial spot, bacterial speck, and bacterial canker, and see which you have on your fruit. They're pretty easy to tell apart.

In your new batch of pictures, #6 does kind of look like bacterial canker with the browning leaf edge bordered by a bright yellow line. Most of the rest of the pictures seem to fit bacterial speck better, though. I suppose it's possible you could have both, but not so likely.

Does your state or county extension service or Master Gardener program offer diagnosis services? I think I'd try to get a professional opinion on this one.

[MissS]

I agree that it looks like bacterial speck but it could also be Septoria. It's hard to tell since there seem to be so few leaves involved in this case. It hasn't ruined the fruit yet, so that's good news. Perhaps you can try treating them with a copper spray in the hopes of saving a few fruits.

I agree that getting a professional diagnosis would be to your advantage. It will help you with your beds in future seasons.