Tomato Blight

Try spraying the entire plant concentrating on the lower banches with cows milk.

The late blight will be bad if it is cool and moist.

It does have to do with draft animal power because I cultivated them with our horses.

If the draft animal person doesn’t have food they won’t work their animals…

Unforunately we have 3 different fungi attacking our tomatoe plants this summer here in New England. Septoria and early blight both exist naturally in our soil and take advantage of the cool wet conditions we have had this summer. Septoria affects only the foliage while early blight attacks the fruit as well. There are some easy methods of control of these but it is probably too late for this year. As the fungus is physically moved up the plant through the splashing of rain drops from the soil and upward you can slow or stop it by mulching heavily with straw or plastic or best is salt hay if you can get it. Also – when heavy rain threatens cover the plants with any type of row cover you can find. As for late blight – it is not too common in New England. This has been brought here in seedlings sold at some warehouse type stores. This was the cause of the potato famine. This fungus is transferred through the seed and into the plant. Where did you get your seed or seedlings? Also – you should move your plantings of tomatoes and potatoes regardless of the type of blight. If you do have late blight you should burn those plants asap and avoid planting potatoes and tomatoes in that area for quite a while!

You should always rotate all of your crops, but with that said the late blight spores can have little chance for survival to next year. Late blight is very temperature sensitive, it stops spore production if it gets too hot or cold. If we all do a good job at killing our infected tomato and potato plants, effectively removing the fungus host, mother nature (heat and winter freeze) wil take care of what spores remain.

We lost all 700 tomato plants to the blight, we managed to get 100 pounds of tomatoes that hopefully covered the cost of seeds and growing our our starts, but a real loss to our winter rations and our pocket books. Our potatoes are also suffering from the blight. We brush hogged the tops to stop the spread of the fungus to the tubers. If we wait 2 weeks for most of the spores to die and then flame the potato patch before we harvest we may have potatoes that we can store in the cold cellar, maybe. It is a tough year but we are thankful that we can take the loss gracefully, the winter may be hard without homegrown tomato sauce but things could still be worse.