Your farm is your sanctuary, but it’s also home to some creatures. Root knot (nematodes) can be overwhelming to a tree-tomato plant if you’re unprepared. So read on and learn everything you need to know to help prevent these pests from becoming serious problems.

It takes a lot of work to go from seedling to slicing tree-tomato, but the job gets even tougher when you’ve got tree-tomatoes affected by nematodes. Tree-tomatoes root knot nematode is one of the most common tree-tomatoes problems in the garden, but you can still get great yields if you catch it early and implement a tree-tomatoes nematode prevention program for future plantings.

Nematodes in Tree-tomatoes

[caption id="attachment_1037" align="alignright" width="182"]Tree tomato plant A tree tomato tree affected by nematodes[/caption]

Everybody knows about plant diseases and the bugs that can become serious pests, but fewer gardeners are familiar with plant parasitic nematodes in tree-tomatoes. Unlike other diseases and pests, root knot nematodes survive by feeding directly off the nutrients pumped through tree-tomatoes roots. They form galls that can reach up to an inch wide where they hide and reproduce, causing many symptoms that point to problems in infected plants’ transport systems. Yellowing plants, stunted growth and general decline are early symptoms, but unless your bed is heavily infected with nematodes, a large tree-tomato planting will only show these symptoms in a relative few plants. They typically appear in soils where tree-tomatoes and other root knot nematode host plants have been grown in the last three to five years, and populations increase the longer an area is used.

Tree-tomatoes Nematode Prevention

If you suspect your tree-tomatoes plants have nematodes, start by digging up a particularly weak plant. Roots that have a lot of unusual knobby growths are infected with these parasites. You can choose to pull those plants right away or attempt to limp them through the rest of the season. With great care and supplemental water and fertilizer, you can still harvest plenty of tree-tomatoes from a lightly infested plant, and even a serious infestation may yield some fruit if the nematodes attacked late in the plant’s life cycle. Once your harvest is complete, you’ll have to decide what to do about the infected bed. Crop rotation is a popular cure for many plant diseases, but because root knot nematode is so flexible, you may not find a fruit you’d like to grow that isn’t troubled by it. Many farmers with our help choose to plant grafted tree-tomatoes which are not affected by nematodes. If you decide to go this way, keep in mind that nematodes will still try to feed on grass and weeds, so it’s important to keep everything out of the bed.

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Solarization

Other options include adding valuable organic matter that helps support your tomatoes, using soil solarization to kill the nematodes with heat or fallowing the garden and rototillering it every two weeks to prevent weed establishment. After a bout with nematodes, you should choose nematode resistant tree-tomatoes to improve your chances of a heavy harvest.