Preventing Late Blight in This Year’s Garden
As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, last summer’s weather was absolutely awful for gardeners in New England. After a slow growing season from unseasonably cool and cloudy weather, a Late Blight epidemic simply swamped most of the tomato and potato crop.
I was happy to see that my favorite seed supplier, Johnny’s Selected Seeds posted an article on their blog specifically dealing with this subject.
Among their recommendations is one I wish more people would heed:
Grow or purchase tomato seedlings that are healthy — do not purchase or plant any seedlings that have disease symptoms.
I can not stress this enough. There is speculation that the Late Blight epidemic was fostered by contaminated tomato seedlings distributed through stores like WalMart, Home Depot and Lowes. As a New York Times article on the subject said:
Professor Fry, who is genetically tracking the blight, said the outbreak spread in part from the hundreds of thousands of tomato plants bought by home gardeners at Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Kmart stores starting in April. The wholesale gardening company Bonnie Plants, based in Alabama, had supplied most of the seedlings and recalled all remaining plants starting on June 26.
Ultimately, the tomatoes I so carefully grew from seedlings in my basement, from seeds of varieties I specially selected, were wiped out by people who just bought some diseased crap from whatever store they happened to be shopping in. Please — if you’re too lazy to start your own vegetables from seed, at least buy your plants from some reputable local nursery (Mahoney’s Garden Centers in Massachusetts always have a great variety of vegetables that they grow themselves in varieties selected to specifically to grow well in Massachusetts).
After last year, I tried to pick up any fruit that was laying around and I burned it. Then I burned the vines that had dried over winter. I will be planting a variety of plum tomato called Juliet which has always been fairly disease resistant in the past, along with an heirloom variety called Brandywine. And I have my copper-based fungicide ready to go, because I’m sure my neighbors weren’t as careful to burn all their exposed plants like I was so I know there is a reservoir of Late Blight waiting to pounce. We can only hope that it’s a dry, sunny summer.
Additionally, I have used a drip irrigation system for the last 5 years to prevent leaving my plants with wet leaves more than the natural rain does. So as long as we have a regular rainfall schedule this summer, I should be in good shape.
Good luck to all gardeners out there.
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I'm old enough to have been around the internet since the beginning -- starting with private BBS systems which I accessed via a Hayes 300 baud modem and then moving on to a genuine CompuServe account! I have a degree in Environmental Science and have had a varied career starting in a laboratory, followed by 10 years in Service & Operations for a large networking equipment manufacturer, and now in a Product Management role for an innovative healthcare organization. I started making web pages on Angelfire and other free services, and can remember when NetZero actually provided Internet access for free (hence the zero in the name). Among other things, I build my own PCs and run my own Linux servers at home for fun.
Preventing Late Blight in my #garden this year: http://robsrants.havasy.net/2010/03/prev...