karstopography wrote: ↑Sat Sep 11, 2021 9:04 am Welcome @Wildcat82 . Another Texan here. Wish I had a silver bullet for your maters. I had a pretty disease free and good tomato season which I chalked down to the massive prolonged February freeze maybe clearing many of the soil based pathogens. If the freeze would only frozen the squirrels I’d really be golden.

Timing, improving soil structure and health, nutrients, etc. that’s the things I think about to help the tomatoes. Mulching in a big way I believe helps tremendously here to control the radical moisture and temperature swings that our lower latitude intense sunlight can cause. Tomatoes don’t like their feet to get cooked or steamed and that’s what happens in Texas after a big rain and then the sun comes out and it’s 90 plus degrees when there’s no mulch. Mulching I believe has really helped my tomato plants thrive maybe more than anything else. I got lucky this year as the big freeze defoliated my bamboo stands and those abundant leaves made for the most excellent free mulch.

My buddy nearby grew the most amazing beautiful tomatoes this season and had even notoriously difficult Pink Brandywine produce well so it is possible to prevail in 29-30 degrees north latitude like what San Antonio is. He grows in raised beds like I do and really tries to control the moisture inputs and works to ensure the soil drains and percolates well. I believe much of the San Antonio area has heavy clay so if that’s true working in a lot of organic matter and elevating some, adding some good compost might really lighten that soil up in a good way.

Maybe you do all these things and more and something else is at work causing the disease issues. I’m doing a solarization treatment currently for my raised beds that’s about to be concluded. Clear sheet plastic over moist, weed free soil. The intense Sun heats up the soil to lethal to pathogens levels. I’m going after nematodes, but solarization is supposed to help with fungal and bacterial diseases as well.

Anyway, lots of experience here on TJ and maybe some other Texas tomato growers will chime in with their two cents. I did know gardeners in Massachusetts when I lived there that grew beautiful tomatoes, but the disease pressures are so much different there. The soil is very different there too. The intensity of the light. Maybe the seasons get nipped short at either end at times by cold weather, but it seemed like the middle was a clean, disease free, not fighting negative pressures so much. Our season here is more see-saw with building heat pressures as things progress.