Signs of Too Much Rain_Water with Tomato Plants.mp4

Hey everybody, Jeff, the Executive Gardener, your Executive Gardener. Hey, thanks for joining me for another episode. So it's Memorial Day, which is really the start of the summer here in Houston, Texas. And it's the start of the summer in most nations around the world. So here we are. It's the middle of the summer. Temperatures are about 80 degrees here in Houston, Texas. And when I talk to my fans around the country, the United States that is, they're all starting to plant. And I'd say the king fruit or the king plant of the summer is the tomato. So the tomato plant is something we all enjoy. It's a great fruit. It can be used on salads, sandwiches, BLTs. I mean, you name it. Everybody loves a fresh tomato. And one of the great things about tomato is that it's refreshing during the summer. So a tomato in itself is 95% water. Most people don't realize that. And there's a huge difference between buying a tomato in the store and eating a tomato fresh picked off the plant. So this one here happens to be fresh picked off the plant, very soft, juicy. You can bite into it like an apple. I won't do that now and embarrass myself and get my shirt all full of tomato seeds and so forth. But here's a problem. Sometimes it can rain too much. And in Houston, Texas, I'd say we've had an unbelievably wet spring. And I would say probably in the last two weeks, we've had 20 to 30 inches in most parts of southeast Texas here. And that's too much for a tomato plant. And it creates all type of havoc and problems with the tomato plant. So in this episode, we're going to talk about the problems that overwatering or too much rain can create on tomato plants. So I'm going to break it down to five different issues. And I'll share with you some things that you can do to prevent some of the problems from having too much rain or you yourself overwatering tomato plants, which can ruin the tomato plant. So the first problem we're going to talk about is leaf roll. So leaf roll is a problem. Second is root rot. Third is blight. It's a fungal disease that tomato plants get and can devastate a crop of tomatoes. Fourth is blossom end rot. You've heard me talk about that. And the fifth problem, which is the most obvious problem for most of us, is the fruit, the outside of the fruit that just cracks. And once a tomato starts cracking, because again, it's 95% water, when it gets too much water, the skin cracks, and it creates all type of issues, disease and so forth So this episode again is what you can do to identify overwatering with your tomato plants or what you can do when you have too much rain to prevent that to help your tomato plants. So let me get behind the camera and show you all five issues with tomato plants so you can identify them in your own garden and possibly do something about it to enjoy your own tomatoes in your fresh garden this year. So here's my side garden. As you know, it's kind of enclosed completely. It's an enclosed structure so no squirrels and birds can get in and there's a top too. So you'll see I got a lot of red tomatoes here. A lot of red tomatoes. Some are still green, but you know, we've got a good amount of red tomatoes throughout, as you can see. So what's kind of cool about this episode is that, you know, many times when you do gardening videos you only show the good stuff, but it's great to show folks when there are problems with tomatoes. And I do have problems. So let's talk about the problems we have. And very few times when I'm filming a video do I have the opportunity to show the five major problems that can occur when it overrains or you overwater your plants. That's exactly the situation that's occurred here as I explained earlier in the video here in Houston, Texas. Now there's nothing I can do to control Mother Nature nor anybody in Houston or Texas can do, but you deal with it and you make the adjustments. You can if you overwater. So if you have these potted or you're watering them in a dry environment, you can pull back the watering. But let me show you some of the issues that are occurring. So the first one again, we've had so much water, is leaf roll. So to identify leaf roll in a plant, let's take a look at this. So you'll see these leaves here, okay. Leaf roll is when a plant, there's a better look right here, leaf roll is, so this is a leaf of a tomato plant and you can see the edges are starting to roll up. They roll up toward the sky and that's exactly what leaf roll looks like. And when you see leaf roll like that, and here's another one right here, you can see they're starting to roll up on the edges. That's a clear example that they're getting too much water. Now in this scenario, there's nothing that I can do to turn off the rain, but perhaps if they were in a container plant or a container garden, you could perhaps bring them inside or stop watering as much. But that's leaf roll. That's what it looks like. The edges of the leaves roll up toward the sky and you can see it's pretty consistent across the plant. Unfortunately in this situation, all I can do is wait for the rain to stop. So that's the first one. So let's take a look at some of the others here. Root rot. So I'm going to put actually root rot and blight together. So because they're both a fungal issue. So the best example here is to show you what's occurred with this plant. So this plant was grown in a bag, and you may have seen this grow bag in an earlier episode, but what's happened here is that because of the excess rain, this bag, this fabric bag has kept in the moisture. And what's occurred is that for root rot to occur, if the water is consistently wet, never dries out, but consistently wet, it creates a perfect environment for fungus to grow. And that's what that's what root rot is. It's fungus that grows on the root and that spreads to the rest of the plant. So what you typically see in this situation is the rest of the plant, you have leaves falling off and then fungus hitting the rest of the plant. So now the fruit doesn't have fungus on it, but the leaves do. That's the first part that gets it. So you take a look at that and that leads to, you know, fungal problems, which is also called blight in tomato plants. And you look at these leaves, that is blight. Okay, that is a diseased plant that doesn't have it much longer to live. And you'll see yellowing of the leaves over there, and discoloration, leaves that are falling, that is blight. So you'll see that, you know, the end, we'll get to this in a second, is cracking, obviously, which is another sign. So, but some of these tomatoes, like this one, again, I got to get this off, it's starting to crack, too much water. But that's what blight looks like. And also the second one I talked about was root rot. Too much, too much water in this pot, there's nothing I can do to stop the rain. So that's number two and number three. And then I would say another issue, which I don't think I have any problems with this here, but is blossom end rot. So typically what happens, and I'll use this as an example, is the bottom of the tomato plant, you'll see there, the bottom of the tomato plant will get dark brown, a dark brown ring around it. And what that's caused by is too much rain, especially in pots, takes the calcium out of the bag, or the pot, or the container, and washes it away. So there's very little calcium in the tomato, and it causes a brown spot on the bottom of the tomato. So that's another issue of overwatering. If you see blossom end rot on the bottom of your tomatoes, that's what it's caused by. Add some calcium supplement to it, reduce your watering, and you'll be in good shape. So the fifth problem, which I talked about, here's a perfect example here, is fruit split. So this is what happens. See, there's too much water. So the skin has nowhere to go, and it just splits. Simple as that. Splits like that. Now I'm going to be okay with this, because you can see there's no bacteria. But if you leave it on too long, what you typically can do is put it in a refrigerator in a little scab, okay? But another one here, again, we got like 10 inches of rain last night. The fruit split, okay? And that's a clear example. You're watering too much, or you're getting too much rain, and it's going to create havoc with your tomatoes. So I didn't have the issue as much with the tomatoes that are in the ground. So I'll give an example of one that's in the ground. Excuse me here. So here's a tomato here, okay? And there's nothing split. But when they're in pots, you know, the pots tend to retain the water, especially fabric bags, and it creates an issue. So again, fruit split is the other sign. There's too much water. Nothing I can do about it with the rain. So that's the five things that impact tomatoes and having, quite frankly, just too much rain. So one of the things you can do, and I talked about blight, but one of the things you can do, and I've done it here, is you can put weed cloth down in your garden. So this is covered with a weed cloth. And what happens is you only, I'll put it right there, you only have a little hole at the bottom when your plants go through. And what that does when it rains is it keeps the mud from splashing on your leaves. Because when the mud splashes on the leaves and there's fungus or disease in the mud, it gets onto your leaves, and then that creates blight as well. So one of the things you can do, again, if you're planting outside, is put a good layer of weed cloth down. When you put that layer of weed cloth, it'll keep a heavy rain from splashing mud to your plant. And also, as I talked about in an earlier episode, what you can do to prevent that blight is cut all the bottom limbs at the bottom that touch the mud, which I've done here. I've done there. So you won't see any leaves at the bottom touching the mud. And I've done here too. So I've taken care of that problem. And then when when the rain comes, it does hit the weed cloth, but the mud doesn't splash up on the plant to help prevent that blight. So let me show you one more thing which may help folks that are growing outside in pots prevent the plants from getting any of the five conditions if they have too much rain. So if you live in an area like Houston that gets a lot of rain or Florida, you know, once every afternoon you get a thundershower, here's what you can do. I bought this flower house, I think, online at amazon.com. And this is if you're growing again, container pots, container tomatoes. And so I put it in the flower house, it protects it. Now what I do here, they get up closer as you have a screen, screen protects it keeps the bugs from getting in. But inside you can see we had about eight inches of rain last night. None of these plants inside here got impacted. And you can see I have some nice, juicy red tomatoes back there and back there. And I'm not having the same, these are the same plants you saw a second ago that were all diseased. I don't have those same issues on on this plant. So they tend to be doing a little bit better, but they're not getting hammered by rain. They're protected by this flower house. And so that's one thing you can do is if you're growing containers is get a cheap flower house on amazon.com. When you're growing them, make sure the screen stays open in the summer because it will get too hot. Put them in a dish underneath and water them as needed. The other thing great about this flower house is that your birds, the birds and squirrels and so forth can't get to the tomatoes. So that's one solution you can do if you have too much rain, especially in some of your southern states. Hey guys, so that's our episode for today. Again, the episode had to do with too much rain, too much water, how you can identify your plants getting too much rain or too much water. So let's go over the five issues again we showed you in this video. Number one, you can identify you have too much rain, too much watering of your own if you have leaf roll. So if your leaves start to curb up on the edges toward the sky. Number two, we talked about root rot, the problem that creates. Number three, we talked about blight, the fungal condition that you mostly see in the leaves of the plant. What you can do to prevent that, use weed cloth, cut the bottom of the tomato plant to keep any leaves of the tomato plant from hitting the ground. Number four, we talked about lack of calcium, which is blossom end rot. So the bottom of the tomato gets a big brown spot. Add a calcium supplement to your soil that's too much rain, too much water, leaches it out of the tomato and in the roots. And fifth is fruit cracking. You can see here, too much water. If you're watering it too much, you're getting too much rain. It causes the fruit to crack, which creates all types of disease, fungus, bugs getting into it and so forth. So that's my episode. That's the five ways to identify you're watering your plant too much or you're getting just too much rain, which of course you can't do much about. But maybe buy a flower house or a greenhouse to protect your plants from the rain. So that's it. I hope everybody enjoys their summer and enjoys eating fresh tomatoes in your backyard. And if you're doing it to yourself, keep yourself from overwatering your plants. You can identify it with the five type of things we talked about today. So if you're not a subscriber of the Executive Gardener channel, please subscribe to our channel or forward it on to someone else that's interested in learning simple tips to improved backyard gardening. Hope everybody has a great week and a great Memorial Day. Have a good one.