On August 13 as far as the tomatoes go, everything was rosy and things were looking good. Well, maybe there is one brown leaf in this picture. The vines were robust, the tomatoes were ripening nicely. We had quite a number of vine ripened fruits to enjoy and it looked like a fantastic year for tomatoes here at the Stone Wall Garden.
If we fast forward to now, we had an agonizing reality to face. TOMATO BLIGHT!!! I have had no experience with tomato blight, and I knew I needed to make a call for help. Here in New York State we are lucky enough to have a Cornell Cooperative Extension offices. Help is just one phone call away. A master gardener will answer your questions, or find the answers for you. A word to the wise , when disaster strikes go for an .edu site to research your problem. .coms usually want to sell you something, and there is no entrance exam to write a garden blog.
Diseased vines must be put in plastic bags, left for some time in the sun, and then put out with the trash. If you are out in the boondocks like we are, burning to control agricultural disease is allowed. We probably put almost a hundreds pounds of tomatoes out with the trash.
Ed decided to burn the straw mulch right in the garden. This was not a happy afternoon's work. We still have more debris for our next trash pick up. For once our cold winter is an advantage. Tomato blight will not survive our cold winter weather. There is potentially more bad news however. We also grow potatoes, and potato blight is not destroyed by the cold. The potatoes vines did die down, but they always do. All we have to look at to check for blight is the potatoes. I wait with some trepidation for the information on potato blight to arrive in the mail. I much prefer having nice healthy plants in the garden, but sometimes...
3 comments:
Likely a combination of factors allowed blight to strike. This time of year the valley fills with fog nightly. Foliage is wet all night and well into the following day. Sucker removal was neglected. The first plants to show blight were a tangled mass of stems and leaves. We cannot control the valley fog but we can tend to pruning out all of the suckers.
Been seeing a few posts on tomato blight lately. I'm sorry that you're having this problem. That's what wrecked my tomatoes last year, I didn't even bother planting any this year.
A blight on blight. Thought I would pass along that once you have destroyed and removed the affected plants, you needn't worry about recurrence next year if you simply dig in more than the usual amount of compost. Then, you should be able to grow crops without blight. I had both tomato and potato blight last summer, and there is no residue in this year's garden. I took the precaution of planting different crops in the sites I had previously grown tomatoes and potatoes. Nearby, tomatoes grow happily with NO blight.
Boston gardener
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