Marsha, I have never been afflicted with the the TYLCV virus until this year and it has devastated my fall tomatoes. The whitefly problem has been the worst I have ever experienced in over 40 years of gardening. I just knew when they got so thick back in August that things were not looking good for my fall tomatoes. I just had no idea how bad it could be. If it weren't for this site I would have had no idea what was stunting my new plants like that. I knew it wasn't iron deficiency or nitrogen deficiency. It didn't look like any herbicide damage that I had ever seen nor any tomato disease I had ever encountered. I have already pulled several beds of tomato plants that were so stunted and performing so poorly as to be useless. I guess I will have to remove far more of them.
It looks like from my inspection of my tomato plants yesterday that there are only a few that are not infected with the TYLCV virus. Most of them have fruit on them so I am wondering if there is any need to remove them since there are so few healthy plants that if I remove all the diseased ones there won't be much point to leaving just a couple that will probably come down with it before long. I am a total novice at dealing with this problem. I had a friend of mine who has been farming tomatoes commercially to look at my plants and he had never seen it before either; but like me he thought it must be some new virus or disease. I have been growing tomatoes in the fall off and on for nearly four decades and I am surprised to have never encountered this problem before; but I have never had whiteflies this bad either. It almost seems blasphemous to say this but this is worse than Late Blight since there seems to be no way to mitigate the problem. There is no way I could ever put up enough sticky traps to have ever made a dent in the whitefly population. They are everywhere here and on most every plant and weed.
I am just hoping that the cooler weather and high winds that moved in yesterday will start to really thin out the whiteflies so my fall crops can have a chance. They will ruin young fall plants in the garden as I have seen them do to fall beans and cucumbers and baby mustard plants just emerging from the ground. I heard about a guy around here who set out a large amount of broccoli plants commercially last month who lost them all to whitefles. I have been keeping all my cole crops in the greenhouse until yesterday in an attempt to wait out the whitefly invasion; but they are getting too large and need to be hardened off so I set them outside and will hope for the best. I also planted mustard, turnips, and carrots yesterday. I have just run out of time waiting for the whiteflies to thin out and have to get some things started and I may have waited too long for some of them but what can you do?
Marsha, thanks for the info on TYCLV. No matter how long I garden it seems that every year or so I see something totally new and baffling. Before Tomatoville it was tough sledding trying to get info to help with problems like this. With the devastation that the whiteflies have inflicted on my plants this year I would just as soon never have seen this particular problem.
There is always another year until there isn't.
Bill