Jun 27, 2009

How not to Grow Tomatoes in Florida

Our home school lesson on vegetable gardening, has turned into a lesson on Florida garden disease and pests. So far our tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers and snaps peas are a total loss!

For some reason the sugar snap peas just refused to thrive.
The tomatoes were a little slow to get going after transplanting, but then seemed to be growing great. However last week the leaves started to curl up and they got thicker. All the blooms that flowered fell off and there is no fruit. It appears our plants have developed Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl Virus.

Photo by Robert L. Gilbertson.

This is the first time I have seen this in Florida and there is not a lot you can do about it, other than growing a virus resistant species of tomato and watching for
whiteflies
.
Photo by Jack Kelly Clark.

I didn't even take pictures before I pulled them, it's was too depressing. I will try again with some new plants ( instead of seeds ) next time and see if they do better.
I'll tell you what took down the cucumbers in my next post.

4 comments:

Joyuna said...

Aw, how sad... It's certainly a learning experience though! :) Now you can take preventative measures and grow better plants the next time.

Heather said...

how discouraging! good luck with the new batch :)

Cthings said...

Sorry to read about the virsus and bugs! That is very disappointing! That is interesting on the flies. I never knew that.

DJ said...

@Joy: Learning is always good, right? :)
@ H.E: It really is discouraging, especially for my son.
@Cindy: Thanks, we hope to do better next time!

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