Tomato and potato leaves unhealthy

Hi,

This year my partner and I decided to start growing veg at home. We are both complete novices.

We put some seed potatoes in sacks to grow while we finished building a big raised veg bed, and bought a small plastic covered greenhouse for tomatoes and cucumbers.

The potato leaves in all sacks have gone from looking healthy and thick, to sparse and spotted, especially after the bad weather.

The tomato plants in pots have green fruit on them and were doing well, being fed as per bottle instructions, but now the leaves are going yellow.

The two cucumber plants gave us two giant cucumbers and now seem to be dying. I’ll try to add pics below.

Could those more advanced than us please offer some insight?

Thanks

 

How big are the pots the tomatoes are in, it looks a bit like a shortage of Nitrogen perhaps.
What feed are you using.
What compost are they growing in.

 

The pots do look small.

 

Bigger pots would certainly have been better but it's too late now to remedy that but perhaps you should feed them twice as often as recommended on the bottle. Tomato plants are very hungry & once a week feed is probably not enough for such big plants in such small pots.

The potatoes look as if they have some leaf spot illness. Little can be done for them at this stage but you could do a search online to see if you can find any pictures that may help you to identify the problem.

 

Tomatoes could be further apart. If you have had dull ,cooler days as here the last month, they are not getting enough light.I would remove the lowest leaves progressively and feed more.
How long have the potatoes been planted ? If more than 15 weeks, they could be done. Have you tried harvesting any ?

 

Thanks for the replies. Tomorite is the feed, and we will increase it to twice a week. Bigger pots next year then.

Compost was from B & Q, peat-free stuff. 100 litre bags.

I did google the potato leaf spots, as I did with the tomato plant leaves. Varied possibilities from early blight to brown leaf spot disease for the potatoes and both look the same to my novice eye, and for tomatoes over-watering, under-watering, too little magnesium, too little nitrogen, too many nutrients, disease, moon phase, etc., is when I decided I needed to join a forum and ask real people with real experience. Google is limited.

 

Dull grey days aplenty here, I’m in north wales.

I thought the tomatoes were too close together, another lesson learnt.

We can’t remember when we did the potatoes, lot going on at the time, I think it was beginning of May… will dig some up and see what’s what. Thanks.

 

Just to wrap this up, the advice to feed the tomato plants twice as often as the tomato food bottle instructions advised (so twice weekly instead of once) did the trick and improved them, and we’ve since had plenty of healthy tomatoes from the plants, although the plants are dying now which is normal for the time of year, isn’t it?

 

No, not really. The toms , if the growing season had been better , may well have gone on A BIT longer.
Twas not an easy year,
Jenny namaste

 

My tomato plants are growing very well indeed. With the cold spring they got off to very bad start but have since recovered & are growing strongly! I, too, increased the number of time I water them with fertilizer to twice a week & what a difference it made! You could practically SEE them growing! Several of the 9 plants I have of 'Gardeners Delight' have reached the top of the strings now & next week I will pinch out the growing tips. I've removed some of the lower leaves & the fruit is starting to ripen. As we are expecting some warmer weather this coming week I hope it will give them a boost in ripening!
.

 

The potatoes planted in the raised bed around the 20th of July were doing really well until a few days ago. They looked very healthy indeed. We had a day or two of heavy rain and this happened:



Here there are two side by side, one is perfect whilst the other has lots of dead and dying leaves.



the dog keeps getting on the raised bed and pooing (maybe weeing too, haven’t caught him yet) and I’m wondering if the rain could’ve washed the substances into the soil and it’s killing the plants? Is that possible?

 

It could be blight.

 

Definitely blight. Don't delay. Cut them down to the ground and put the tops in your council bin or burn them. Don't put them in the compost bin. You should still get a crop. Rake off the surface to make sure no bits are left then leave for 2 weeks. This will make sure the spores die and then you can dig the spuds safely.