Its now the beginning of October and most of my tomato plants are gone
 

I have been growing tomatoes for many years. This is the first time that the plants started dying well before the first frost hit. I took a lot of them out of the soil today. Could it be late blight?

Mine are also gone in SW Pa. I blame mine on early blight.
Ed

Mine, too- from EB and Septoria. Late Blight would have killed them very, very fast- like in about a week. The lesions are quite distinctive- did you take pictures? There are lots of threads here about it or you could google images of what it looks like. There were reports of Late Blight on LI this year.

Mine are still OK, I thought I might have gotten Late Blight last week, but it turned out to be an imitator. I've never had Late Blight before so I was alarmed to see something that looked like it.
It's been difficult to manage this and Septoria since the weather has been constantly rainy, damp and cool this past week, but most of the foliage is still very green and healthy.
I still have quite a few good sized fruit on the vines either green or blushing, so I'll keep things going best I can till frost, as I always do. It looks I'm in for a long stretch of sunny, warmer weather starting Wednesday, so that will make things easier.

Hope these help:

[url]http://www.longislandhort.cornell.edu/vegpath/photos/lateblight_potato.htm[/url]

[url]http://uspest.org/risk/tom_pot_map[/url]

[url]http://ipcm.wisc.edu/WCMNews/tabid/53/Entryid/1192/Late-Blight-on-Long-Island.aspx[/url]

Elliot, we grow pretty much in the same zone. I am still getting production. I planted my in the ground garden about a month or so after the containers, and the in the ground plants are still pretty vigorous. I am harvesting Sungold and Black Cherry now, with plenty of green cherries on the vine. While I find they are more thick skinned now than they were earlier in the growing season, they are quite tasty. My container Eva Purple Ball plants still have about 20 (albeit smaller) tomatoes on the vine, and I'm sure those will need to be plucked green and ripened indoors. The ones in the ground are just getting their first harvest - probably about the latest I've ever gotten. Am getting a little production from Brandywine, Virginia Sweets and Sanibel, and from Sprite (a red grape). Overall I'm pretty surprised. However, i did lose a bunch of container plants to various disorders earlier in the season.

All of my tomato plants are in containers. Its just that the plants themselves turned brown and died even with fruit on them

I've got mine in containers as well and have already pulled 3 tomato plants and a pepper plant that were done for the year. Got a couple plants that are looking pretty brown and losing a lot of leaves, but I've been keeping 'em going so that I can let the remaining tomatoes at least blush before I pull them put about half of my tomatoes are still doing pretty well. At least we're getting some warm weather this week here and it looks like I should get a nice little late harvest in the next week or so.

I am wondering if in my case it is late blight because the tomatoes themselves don't look good and the plants lost all of their leaves.

I've noticed that the tomatoes in containers seem to have "run out of gas" as well. Lots of brown leaves and super puny tomatoes. The ones in ground are still kicking so I'm thinking the shorter days and probably a smaller availability of nutrients is what gets them. Aside from a couple spoonfuls of Miracle Grow tomato food I found, I didnt fertilize them except right before planting.

Or maybe its a disease, I dunno. I figure with my plants, the ones in the ground would have been hit first. The only brown those plants have is from the tomato worms earlier in the season. And that was just my yellow pear. Thankfully.

Hard to say there, there's so many factors that can go into that. I did fertilize regularly through the whole season, but I had some issues with Stink Bugs and some little caterpillars that seemed to be mostly on that end of the garden so that was likely what got those plants for me.

I met with my next door neighbor this afternoon. He is a master gardener and has been doing it for 50 years. He too said that his container grown tomatoes turned brown and died at the end of Sept. What is also strange is that my sage plants which normally flower in late Oct have already for the most part flowered.

My tomatoes are all done. Last week it rained for 5 days and very cold. The plants just gave up, turned brown and died. The garden flooded and this is the 3rd wettest September in Michigan history. The weather this week is super nice and tomorrow it is going to reach 80 degrees. I will take advantage of the warm weather, clean up the garden and call it a season. In Michigan we had a rough start, but overall we had a great year.

In August we got some good tomatoes. Not as many as we had in prior years but enough to feed us and give some away. Sept was a wipe out though.

It's over for me.
I've already pulled out about 40 plants and have less than 10 to go. The only reason they are not out already is that my yard waste bins are filled until I dump them on Saturday.

I had a record breaking Summer. Friends and family were shocked at the amount of tomatoes. However, once they started to turn, they crashed pretty fast. They just hit the wall and died.

One thing I did differently this year is that I started them really early from what I normally do. I started seedlings back in February. I think next year I will hold off a bit and see if I can have stronger plants going into September. We have had some wacky weather so its hard to guess if I would still have good plants. It's been beautiful this week but this weather has been up and down all Summer long.

Between the second week of August and Sept 1st it was insane. Wish I still had a few ripe ones coming in. All I have is a bunch of green ones on the table right now. Green ones I picked off of dying plants as I was pulling them.

I admit, still learning about all this stuff!