I personally have never grown Amazon Chocolate but the others mentioned as being disease resistant are not resistant to foliage diseases though some do have more resistance to fusarium and nematodes than many. I haven't found a single variety that is really resistant to foliage diseases and most of the so called black tomatoes are actually more susceptible to gray mold and thus need more spraying with bleach and copper fungicide. Copper seems to work better against gray mold than Daconil for me when fighting gray mold or even spot and speck diseased; but when it comes to things like Early Blight Daconil seems far superior in my experience. Down here no matter how well you try to protect your plants with fungicides the diseases will eventually get through and that is when the bleach spray really comes in handy.
The only time when the bleach solution when mixed and applied correctly will kill the whole plant is when the plant is totally diseased. I cannot stress enough the importance of using the bleach spray early in the disease process. As soon as you see disease on a plant there is a lot more there that you can't see and waiting only makes the problem worse.
Despite regular use of the bleach spray and applications of Daconil I am starting to see the first signs of speck and spot diseases so I will be applying a copper spray this week also as a preventative. So far gray mold has not made an appearance but I expect it any day now but maybe the regular spraying has kept it at bay along with unusually dry hot weather.
We are expecting rain the next few days and after the week of near 100 degree temps I'm sure I'll see some GM next week on at least a few of my black tomatoes. JD's Special C Tex, Black Krim, Carbon, Indian Stripe, Cherokee Purple, Spudakee, Black from Tula, or Berkley Tie Dye Pink are usually the first to get Gray Mold. The GWR tomatoes seem to also be more susceptible than the pinks and reds.
Bill
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