Tomato Plants and The Wicked Wilt

[Pictured above: Celebrity tomato babies in the non-cursed bed]

I selected 6 tomato varieties to grow from seed this year: Celebrity, Jetsetter Hybrid, Goliath Hybrid, Pineapple, White Queen, and Marianna's Peace. (Only 6, you might ask? Oh, believe me, I would have grown 60 if I could have accomodated them all.) In years past, I'd only grown unusual tomato varieties from seed (e.g., Green Zebra and Great White); I'd purchase North Carolina Cooperative Extension recommended tomato varieties like Park's Whopper, Celebrity, and Better Boy transplants from a garden center nursery. I always wondered, though, if I could grow even the old stand-by's from seed to ensure that I had the healthiest, stockiest transplants possible for the tomato patch. If my plants were attacked by diseases (and now I know it's not if, but when), at least I'd know that they were from my own practices--not riding into the garden on a nursery-bought seedling. So here I am. The growing process up until transplanting went very well this year: the plants were deep green, stocky, and repotted twice into tall styrofoam cups (I absolutely love these for transplants) so that the stems had ample opportunity to fashion one heck of a root system. And then...well, and then they were planted. In wicked, wicked dirt. They grew and grew. And then one day-- a day that did not seem to be going badly--4 of my tomatoes wilted. Oh, I was so mad! There was absolutely no yellowing of the foliage, no spotting, no browning. Just seemingly healthy tomato plants--full of blooms and babies--dying of thirst in my garden! How could this be? The soil had been fed thoroughly--greensand, rock phosphate, my very best homemade compost. The plants had been carefully mulched with wheat straw. I'd painstakingly provided water to the soil only (water on leaves=bad thing) at a rate of about an inch per week. I'd grown the transplants myself. So what now? I could only guess bacterial wilt. I performed a test by placing a portion of the wilted plant's lower stem in a glass of clear water and watching for milky streams of bacteria oozing from the cut. I got milky water without streams--what's that all about? Additionally, the stem was not brown as is supposedly the case with bacterial wilt when the vascular system begins to become badly infected. I sent an email to the good folks at NCSU about my problem...and am still waiting to hear their take. As it stands now, four plants in one bed are gone; 2 in that same bed remain wilt-free for now. In my second tomato bed, all 6 of my plants (1 of each variety) are growing strong. I'm almost afraid to even write about them for fear tomorrow they'll all be languid and draping over their cages. In my quest for perfection in the tomato patch, I had completely overlooked the fact that tomatoes had been grown in that same now-cursed 4x8 bed for the past 3 years. How could I have violated one of the most important tenets of organic gardening by continuing to grow the same crop in the same bed for that long? Oh, I did it... I killed them! Tomatoes, you're movin' next year! And Wicked Soil, get ready to be solarized!