mystery pest plague or affliction

[bower]

Yesterday morning I discovered several of my seedlings were horribly curled, with white spots on stems and petioles and big whiite bumps on the growing tip shoot (and curled up with it). I also found some rasping type feeding damage on a few PL leaves in that group.

T'ville was down, so I had to do something, decided more likely insect than disease. I managed to get Robin's DE spray recipe to come up sufficiently in google by using seven search terms. So I took some quick pix before I sprayed em, hoping to get some advice. Please.
First time using the DE spray too, which dried kind of blotchy but I hope would be nasty for any kind of hideous pest on or emerging from my little plants.
Any more tips on the use of DE spray would be appreciated, and any help to ID the plague.
TIA for your comments.

[oakley]

What is different than last year?
Soil? Temp?

I ask since i am in Newfoundland with so different issues than back home in NY.
We had 4 inches of snow this morning. Home is wood fired cook oven for heat. 85 inside. so hot windows are open. Air quality is weird and i have similar leaf issues but not the specific dark green spots.

I do have molted foliage and very slow growth even with heat.
Micro greens day 5 are ready to harvest in a sunny window. What's up with that?

My tomatoes here not happy but no dark green spotting....[ATTACH]IMG_3135.jpg

IMG_3134.jpg[/ATTACH]

[Cole_Robbie]

Bower, your leaf closeup looks like thrip damage.

[oakley]

I think it is temp shift and air quality but if thripe, or is it thrip (?)...use a gentle soap spray, very mild. I use DrBronners diluted by one/half tps to a gallon and a spit of denatured alcohol. (i'm cautious).
Moving my toms to a cooler back room....

[bower]

Thanks Cole and Oakley.
I thought thrip damage as well on the leaf.

The bump thing, curling and white spots on stems I have never seen on tomatoes before. My peppers have had a hard time with tiny or invisible pests though. Thrips, whiteflies, fungus gnats, miners, aphids... have all been ID'd as a problem at one point or another. Never anything like that white patch on the stem, but I have seen 'the bumps' on peppers and it's eggs laid, when they hatch out it's game over for the leaf.
I'm assuming for now that that white scaly patch is just a mass of eggs. And thinking I've seen similar under pepper leaves but never on a tomato before.

I've used soap with the peppers, much soap! and I have promised myself, no more soap. It doesn't work, it just becomes an endless loop of more and more soap without end. I'm done with it.
So now I'm trying the DE/water spray that Robin talked about and hoping that works.
It came out and dried as quite a spatter so the plants look pretty messed, I think it's enough to mess up small insects worse though. And I'll say that a day later, the PL seedling with the bumps in the picture is standing tall and looking pretty normal cw yesterday..so I'm hopeful. DE you spray on and let it dry, repeat after rain which is no need since we're indoors yet. I hope once is enough for the most part (is it possible?).


What's different this year? The sphagnum peat is different. Used to get a potting mix ready to use made of Pisces compost and... peat! They stopped providing that, so I mixed their compost with this imported peat stuff. It's light brown and super peaty. Peatiest peat ever. I'm not too happy with it but.. the other hundred tomatoes look okay with it. Also different, tomatoes were on a warm shelf under lights for a couple of weeks, instead of being put straight into a cold window under lights. The leaves were too soft, stems not strong, but they perked right up to normal when I potted them and put them in the window. However.. pests enter house via window, the seals still need to be replaced.
FWIW, the problem started after a sunny day, not after a snowstorm. Maybe a good clue to bugs vs fungus?

[bower]

BTW Oakley your microgreens look great! Some wierd woodstove-microgreen synergy!

[oakley]

I've had super peaty peat. So peaty it it puffs up and keeps being peaty. And puffy. No warm water gets to it at all but puffy and air balooney.
Then a few years ago i was confident by purchasing a bale of knock-off pro-mix and it compacted like cement almost immediately.

I think my tomatoes here are doomed. With the snow storm today i did not once a day again get to the only possible hardware store that might have some ok potting mix an hour away...
Back home in NY a neighbor is tending my beauty starts me hopes. I'm cool with any mishaps. A day in the life of a gardener...

I'm on the rock and could not be in more bliss no matter the weather.

[Marcus1]

"The bump thing, curling and white spots on stems", could be describing botrytis, potassium bicarbonate or neem and soap would help.
Marcus

[bower]

Marcus, did you mean powdery mildew?
The botrytis we get it here, and it's grey, but I just did a fungus refresher via google and found pix identified as powdery mildew on tomato stems, and I think that for sure could be it.
Never seen this on seedlings before, and realistically I should accept they have little hopes of making it to adulthood.
Sadly what they say about the mildew is that by the time spots are visible the spores have already been spread. Wait and see I guess.
I wonder where it came from?

[bower]

So... it seems to be a case of pest + plague, that explains where it came from.

The powdery mildew that grows on stems and the top side of leaves is Oidium neolycopersici. It has 60 hosts in 30 families, so there are lots of places for a pest to be feeding on overwintered or perennial plants, then brought the spores with it when it came indoors.

There were also some grass roots in one of the bags of compost I had brought in ("unopened") from outdoors. So possibly the spores were passed on that way, and happened to get into that particular batch of seedlings - F2 siblings potted up with the same stuff. Also possible they were attractive to the pest for some genetic reason - something I already noticed in a related line - and got it that way.

The funny thing is, the DE I sprayed is probably as good as baking soda or milk or... other antifungal remedies since it is alkaline and has fairly high calcium in it. Ironically, the DE splashes I left on the plants look as much like mildew as can be. I'll never know if it's spreading on those leaves. They don't have much chance anyway, with the main stems affected at such a tender age.
Some links about the mildew:
http://plantdoctor.eastwestseed.com/...wdery-mildew-2
cesantabarbara.ucanr.edu/files/198869.pdf
https://www.emlab.com/s/sampling/env...t-03-2009.html
This one has a good picture of mildew on tomato stem, and some recipes for treatments:
https://honolulufarm.wordpress.com/2...owdery-mildew/

[Lindalana]

aww, that is nasty! I hope you will get some recovery though. I swore off bringing any potted plants or soil from outside indoor- recipe for disaster. Thankfully promix we have around has been good but I have heard it can come with problems too.
Thanks for great links on problems!

[oakley]

So what is the outcome? How have they been doing?
Or did you start over with some new plantings...
I should have offered to send some starts to you and not too late...
Always friends heading to the StJohn's area every weekend. Many friends there.

[bower]

I isolated the 5 seedlings that were affected. They had already been copiously sprayed with the DE/water mix and for some reason they seemed to like it and perked up right away. They're still alive in a bucket in my room upstairs. I just put the others out in the greenhouse yesterday, so I meant to bring them down and hose em off and see whether any of them are good enough to plant... maybe outdoors, later much later.
Another thing happened though, which is that a number of the plants got edema on their leaves. I was convinced at first it was some kind of gall mites - looked just like it in pix of other kinds of plants, but couldn't find any confirmation anywhere reporting a case of gall mites on tomatoes. Instead I found pictures of "edema" - bumps on the undersides of leaves, caused by water uptake issues.

Peaty problem. I think you were right.
I don't know what I'm going to put in my containers this year.
How did your stormy seedlings make out? I have some extras too, if you're short.

[bower]

Here's a pic of the wierd "edema". I picked off some and put in a jar as a precaution - on suspicion that some gall making insect would hatch.

[bower]

The survivors... facing the next challenge.