Tomato Troubles!

Yes, look at these beauties. Luscious and green and bursting full of summer. Our tomatoes are doing great. Well, SOME of our tomatoes are doing great. It seems we have 3 stages of tomato health in our garden.

The shot above is of the latest plants to be repotted. And because we'd run out of room for hanging baskets we planted them in a potato patio planter. They don't seem to mind, infact I would say they're thriving.

So in order of decline, next on our list is one of the hanging baskets.
Now, they look OK. They definitely don't look healthy. Just OK. This shot is of the hanging basket that's to the right of the shed door. The shot below is the one to the left.
Now, they definitely don't look healthy. I would go so far as to say they don't even look OK. Originally both hanging baskets were looking like the shot above, so we did a little test and fed the one on the right more often than the one on the left. It seems to have worked because the one on the right does look better than the left. But why are they having troubles when the fellas in the patio planter are looking brilliant?

Maybe the depth of the soil?
The plants in the hanging baskets obviously won't have as much room as they would in the patio planter. But we used the baskets last year and had no problems.

Maybe the soil we used?
This year we've only used peat free soil so maybe that's caused a problem. We also lined the baskets with sphagnum moss this year. Again, could that be leeching all the minerals away from the tomatoes?

I checked in the ever helpful Vegetable & Herb Expert by Dr. D G Hessayon and we think it might be magnesium deficiency. You can help this by spraying the plants with epsom salts. This we did last weekend... hard to say whether they look any better. They certainly don't look any worse so I guess we have to be thankful for that.

Oh... and the huge downpours we've been having have caused some of the fruit to split... all in all, not a good year for the tomatoes so far.