Reader Questions: Too Much Rain for Tomatoes
By Vanessa Richins
Terri asks:
“I live in NJ, we’ve had too much rain; a few of my tomato plants are not doing well.
Is the rain the prob? Leaves are drooping, appreciate response.”
Hello Terri. It is probably true that too much rain is hurting your tomatoes.
It’s a strange thought isn’t it - when you think of wilting leaves, you would think it was due to lack of water. However, overwatering can also produce wilting leaves.
It’s especially problematic if you have a clay soil. In the different soil types, a key characteristic is the size of the soil particles. Clay soil has the smallest particles, so they are very close together and don’t drain water well.
Roots work in the soil to take up nutrients and grow. However, since they’re underground, they use a different energy process that requires oxygen, instead of photosynthesis. When the soil has too much water, the plants aren’t able to access the oxygen and start to die.
As MSUCARES notes, “Sometimes tomato plants can recover from saturated conditions should soils dry out quickly, but roots are usually damaged so severely that investing in a new plant is the best way to go. Besides, even if the roots were to survive they would be susceptible to a number of soil borne diseases such as Pythium and Phytophthora root rot.”
It depends on how just how long it’s been raining and how hard it was. You could perhaps wait a bit to see how they recover (hopefully). It might be easier, however, to just pull them out so that the root rots don’t set in.
I hope they still have a chance. Good luck!
