Looks like curly top, but may not be.

[David52]

This year again in my greenhouse, some of the tomato plants, about 1/3, are afflicted with some disease that resembles curly top virus. However, it may not be that. It looks like it, it affects squash and eggplant as well, however the following reasons would indicate that it isn't.

Curly top virus is spread by some exotic beet leaf hopper, and can show up in western Colorado when conditions are right in the western deserts and they blow in on the wind. I must be over-wintering this inside the greenhouse, because it occurs when its still freezing outside and the leaf hoppers, if there are any, are still snoozing the winter away somewhere out in the desert. I don't see any bugs, I use yellow sticky tape routinely.

-The plants don't die. They have leaves that slowly curl, the leaves have blue veins, but according to the info on the true curly top, the plants should decline and die in a matter of a few days, couple weeks at most. Mine are now 3 weeks into this, and still alive. The potato leaved plants are still growing, but slowly, the regular leaved ones are static.

I spray malathion for bugs weekly in the greenhouse.

These pictures show 6 week old plants, the regular leaf shows the blue veins and turned over leaf. The potato leaf shows the weird leaf deformation.

The affected eggplant, all of them I planted, stopped growing, show mildly curing leaf edges, and now are shooting new growth at the leaf joints further down the stem. This had me thinking it might be something else, a thrip or so?

Any help or suggestions would be most welcome.

[Tania]

David,

I am not an expert in tomato diseases, but this looks like some sort of deficiency to me - I sometimes see this type of leaves on the plants that are stressed by either too small of a container, or poor soil mix, or both.

It doesn't look like curly top virus to me.

[David52]

Thanks, Tania. I may indeed be using a poor soil mix, I've tried to cut the purchased potting soil with an addition of the upper crust from the dried soil in my pond, which may be too alkaline. I'll try some in different pots with different soils.