This season I had the sneaking suspicion that the leaves which had holes from flea beetles, somehow turned into Septoria. It seems very logical that the damage can cause an entry way for disease to get in. Here's a discussion on the subject:

https://vegetablegrowersnews.com/news/f ... nsylvania/

From now on, I will be trimming any flea-beetle-damaged leaves from my plants sooner rather than later!

Linda

Thanks for that article. There's another one even more in depth imbedded within the article:

https://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/download.php?id=135)

I've got the nastiest blght on my tomato stems, wherever they were supported with the jute and it rubbed against the stem. IDK if the stuff was contaminated, or maybe my plant stems were just too tender? Nah. It had to come with the jute.
Little baby tomatoes, and you don't know what day the whole stem is going to be kaput... so totally no good.

Bower that is why we don't use jute or twine. We've found the best way to tie up plants is with strips of a soft stretchy material. Go to a thrift store and buy a couple of cheap pairs of women's pants for probably less than a roll of jute. We cut one side seam off each side then cut them straight across the legs in about 1" width strips.

[mention]EdieJ[/mention] I'm wondering how your plants made out with the damage. Some of my stems are looking pretty bad. One plant has a healthy shoot coming from the base of the stem, I am tempted to cut the damaged monster down and let it come again. Not much in the way of fruit set on it. OTOH it has flowers on and a chance of setting higher up, but will the plants last long enough to grow and ripen them?
If I thought it would stay superficial, I would try some kind of topical treatment to kill the spores so it doesn't spread. But I would hate to go to a load of trouble and find the rot going into the stem before you know it...
What do you think?

[mention]Bower[/mention] I am not sure in your zone if it would have time to regenerate roots and then set tomatoes. Are there any sucker branches you could cut and root without taking out the whole plant just in case?

Yeah I thought about that, rooting some cuttings as possible replacements too... it would be now or never season wise.
I think the roots on the plants are fine, but the main stems are a mess. All the shoots that were not tied up with jute are still fine.. IDK it depends on the weather, if it will also spread to the healthy parts.
The worst of it is, they are big indeterminate plants, I haven't pruned consistently so there's a ton of tomato plant mass there, which means if or when it all starts to rot, it will be a nasty job to clean it out. There's not enough fruit on them to justify the hours, honestly.
I may be better off without the worst of those plants. There's always next year...

Than you for this. I'm in PA and had similar conditions. I wasn't positive what was occurring. There is a strong possibility this is what was happening

Something I do with all of my tomatoes early on is to spray them with Surround - this keeps disease spreading insects off. I only stop this on the cherry tomatoes, once they start producing - it's a pain to get off the small ones, but it wipes off the large ones easily. Eggplants are the plants I started using Surround on, as they were a flea beetle magnet here! But if they couldn't go to those, they'd go to the tomatoes, so I started spraying those, as well as a number of other plants.

I have had my best anti-flea beetle results by misting the beds with pyrethrin right after the initial planting, then once more on plants and bed at the very first sign of a shot hole, usually about a month later. That seems to do the trick.