Hi
@nacarter1972
Welcome to NGA! I hope you'll discover the vast array of friendly gardeners and information resources here!
Your tomato plant is exhibiting classic signs of "epinasty". Sounds nasty ๐ But it's fairly benign. Tomatoes develop it so easily that you'll find lots of pictures of tomatoes if you search on "epinasty". It can easily be caused by herbicide drift, as indicated by Ken
@kenisaac and Rick
@Leftwood but in your case that's unlikely, as they said.
In the case of your plants it could simply have been caused by keeping the soil too wet. They're small plants freshly potted and there's more water being held than they can use. Another possibility is lighting effects but I don't have the impression that's a factor with yours. I've added a couple links below.
Don't throw out your plants! (Yet). It's probably temporary and in any case it's probably not a disease, a pest problem, or contagious. Give them a chance to grow out of it.
The leaves and stems that have already curled will stay curled. They're still functional. When the cause of the epinasty is corrected I expect the new growth will be normal. It might take a couple nodes of growth before the change shows.
There is an outside chance it's caused by a bacterium but I think that's unlikely because from the information you gave the seeds came from the same lots, were handled the same way as the normal ones, were potted in the same mix, etc. Still, if the plants don't grow out of it, I would say discard them instead of risking contaminating the garden soil.
If overwatering is causing the epinasty you will probably see normal or more-normal leaves developing by the 2nd new leaf. With a month before they're planted out, I suppose they'll be getting some outdoor exposure, which will help by drying the soil faster. Also as the plant grows it will remove moisture faster. Right now it's a baby possibly floating in a bathtub of wet potting mix.
Best wishes for their recovery.
Pat
https://www.gardenanswers.com/...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/....
GRIEVE, B. J. "Epinastic Response Induced in Plants by Bacterium Solanacearum E.F.S." Annals of Botany, vol. 3, no. 11, 1939, pp. 587โ600. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/42.... Accessed 26 Mar. 2024.
