[TomatoDon]

What is the culprit? When renders the soil unfit to use year after year? Fungus, bacteria, bugs, nematodes? Couldn't the soil be treated for this? We all know that gardeners use the same place in the back yard or at the farm over and over with no significant problems. A family here used the same garden spot at their old family farm for over 100 years and they never mentioned having to alternate it with other ground. I know a lot of people like to use old half whiskey barrels in patio gardens and I would be surprised if they have discard the soil and add new soil each year. With limited space, another issue for them would be where to keep putting the old soil mix, unless it might could be alternated every other year.

I hope there is some way to treat the soil mix because I expect to have 250 twenty-five gallon container grown tomatoes this year and if this works I'd like to double it to 500 next year. It would be a significant investment of time and money to completely replace the soil in all of them every year. Also, what might be practical and work well on a small scale will probably require too much labor to be a practical solution on a large scale.

Any suggestions will be appreciated. This best I can think of is to treat each container with fungicide at the end of the year when the plants are pulled, but I doubt that would be enough to treat all the other possible issues.

Thanks in advance.
Don