Thread: Fusarium Wilt
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Old June 1, 2017   #11
b54red
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Alabama
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It sure looks like fusarium wilt to me and I have seen a lot of it over the years. The first or second year I was gardening in this location the local extension expert came out to see my garden after I took in a couple of dying tomato plants. He said I couldn't grow tomatoes in my soil because I had such a terrible fusarium wilt problem. He said the only type I could possibly have any luck with were hybrid varieties that had FF resistance and RKN resistance. For years those were the only types I grew but eventually became tired of the sameness and the rather uninspiring flavor of most of those varieties with the exception of Big Beef. I finally started growing heirlooms with very limited success as most of them died rather quickly and most didn't live long enough to even set any usable fruit. I started keeping large numbers of replacement plants and trying all kinds of things to protect them but it was mostly a matter of luck. If we had a really cold winter then the next year I would lose less plants and have to replace fewer dead ones the first few months. Basically that is how I got into staggered planting dates which I still use. Sometimes I could replace a plant killed by fusarium with another variety or even the same variety of heirloom and that plant might do okay despite the fact that it was in the same spot. Sometimes I would replace the plants in several spots every month or so and never get one to survive yet the one right next to it might do fine for months before finally getting sick. The very next year the spot that was terrible would be okay and the spot that seemed to have less fusarium the year before might be the worst spot in the garden. So to answer your question. Yes you can have plants in the same bed not be affected right next to plants dying from fusarium. I never found a true rhyme or reason for the disparity.

As I got older and my health became worse doing all that removing and replacing plants just got to be too much especially when the third race of fusarium wilt showed up in my garden and fewer and fewer plants survived for any reasonable length of time and my FF resistant hybrids rarely lived much longer than some of the heirlooms, I gave in to the inevitable and began grafting onto FFF resistant root stock. It was a good bit of trouble figuring out a procedure that gave me good results grafting but it was certainly rewarding knowing I can at least for the time being grow any variety I want just as long as I can get a good graft.

Bill
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