Sunscald
A pale papery patch on the side of the fruit that faces the sun. It starts shiny white or yellow, then goes brown, sunken and leathery. Nothing infected it and it does not spread. The tissue was cooked by direct sun once the leaves that had been shading it were gone.
Disease checklist
Four things to look for. If most of them match what you are holding, you are in the right place.
What gets rid of it
Gentlest option first. For most backyard cases the first one is enough, so try these in order and stop as soon as it works. If you do spray something, the product label tells you how — please read the notice further down.
1Keep the leaves on
Do not strip or over-prune foliage. The crop's own leaves are the shade the fruit needs.
Try this first2Treat the leaf diseases
Most sunscald follows early blight or mildew stripping the canopy, so protecting the leaves protects the fruit.
3Cage instead of hard-pruning
Grow tomatoes in cages so foliage stays over the fruit, rather than pruning down to a bare stake.
heavy duty tomato cage4Shade cloth in a heat wave
Throw 30 percent shade cloth over the row when several days over 95 degrees are forecast.
30 percent shade cloth garden5Pick exposed fruit early
Harvest fruit sitting out in the open before the hot spell instead of leaving it to finish on the vine.
As an Amazon Associate, Story Thyme Farms earns from qualifying purchases, at no cost to you. It never changes what we recommend.
Which plants get sunscald
Every plant we cover that gets sunscald, grouped by type — tap any one to open its page. A note beside a plant came from that plant’s own entry, because the same disease can be a minor nuisance on one plant and a serious problem on another. Plenty of plants we do not cover get it too.
tree1
Plant families hit hardest
Related plants often share the same problems, so if one plant in a family has it, check the others. The largest group here is Cucurbitaceae, with 2 of the 6 affected plants.
- Cucurbitaceae2 plants
- Rosaceae2 plants
- Solanaceae2 plants
When to treat
Act before the heat wave, not after, because a scalded fruit cannot heal.
Timing only — the label is the law
This page tells you when to watch for sunscald and when treating is worth considering. It is not a recommendation to apply any particular product. Read and follow the product label before you spray — under federal law the label is the legal instruction, and using a pesticide against it is illegal.
- Check the pre-harvest interval. Every product that’s cleared for an edible crop sets a minimum number of days between spraying and picking. Find it on the label before you spray anything you intend to eat.
- Check the re-entry interval before you or anyone else works in the treated area again, and use the protective equipment the label names.
- Confirm the product is registered for your crop in your state. This page groups many different crops together, and a product legal on one of them is not legal on all of them — state registrations differ too. Your state pesticide agency or local extension office can confirm both.
- Rates and mixing instructions come from the label, never from us. We don’t publish them because they differ by product and formulation.
Other problems on the same plants
If a plant gets sunscald, these are the problems it most often gets as well, so they are worth checking for while you are out there. They tend to appear together; one does not cause another.