Hi guys,

Novice-y gardener here. Moved to an apartment with a micro-balcony and decided to plant two tomato plants, a sungold and a bush variety, as well as an eggplant this year. The balcony gets good sun, and plenty of other flowers and herbs are doing fine. But not the tomatoes.

The tomato leaves have been turning yellow and drying out, starting at the bottom. The sungold is becoming especially bare since all the leaves are dying. The bush variety does not look as bad, but I did notice white fuzz on the base of the stem. Also, I moved all the plants over yesterday and there was white spider-webby stuff on the wood beneath them and it was very damp.

Please—I am most interested in answers that focus on how to possibly save my plants at this point, rather than answers like "you should've planted them in bigger containers or grow bags". I received plenty of those kind of answers on Reddit, and while they might be true, they do not help me today.

Here are some pictures.

The Sungolds and the white stuff underneath the planter:








The bush-variety tomato plant:





and my eggplant, which seems a little better off but still has yellowing leaves on the lower part.

I don't have a lot of experience with this but I wonder if it would be helpful to spray the tomato plants with Neem oil and then repot them into some nice fresh topsoil? Hopefully others with more experience growing veggies out here will chime in as well.

Tomatoes shouldn't be grown in pots, sorry to say this. They need a lot of care if grown in pots.
Do you fertilize them? They will only grow as good as the soil that you have in the pot. Yellowing
of the leaves should be removed not left on the plant. Maybe buying tomotoes at the farmers market
might be wise for those that live in apts?

Tomatoes can be successfully grown in pots, Ive been doing it for years. It might just be because it's the end of season. The stuff on your deck is just spiderwebs. They do look rather wet; do a finger test on them to see if they are getting too much water, tomatoes are funny, they don't like to be too dry or too wet, they want to be somewhere in between. Also I would go ahead and remove the dead leaves, the plant should produce more. Have you been fertilizing? Tomatoes grown in pots need quite a bit because of all the watering.
And maybe bigger pots next year.