Monday, July 13, 2009

Late Blight of Tomato Continues to Spread

You’ve been warned. Late blight is here and continues to affect commercial and home plantings of tomato and potato. A farmer friend called me minutes ago to report a farm right across the river where tomato was confirmed with late blight.

Now it seems a matter of time before we see wholesale injury to this popular crop. Although relatively dry weather has prevailed recently, morning dew in enough to support late blight infection.

I could say more but my co-horts in Lehigh Co have done a great job. See this link.

The best pictures I've seen are from Cornell.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

How sad, I am an organic gardener with 63 heirloom tomatoes or 23 different varieties, all gone. I cried a lot today. We are in Upstate NY--- beware. I have 100% loss. I inspected every day and the blight took my plants in matter of hours.

Anonymous said...

How sad, I am an organic gardener with 63 heirloom tomatoes or 23 different varieties, all gone. I cried a lot today. We are in Upstate NY--- beware. I have 100% loss. I inspected every day and the blight took my plants in matter of hours.

Scott Guiser said...

Yes, it is sad that this disease is taking out some many plantings. Organic growers have few effective tools to manage it. This is a lesson in the difficulty in growing food. As bad as this is, imagine loosing your primary food source (1840's Irish and potatoes.)

On the bright side... next year you get a fresh start. And it's not too late to plant fall crops in that tomato ground.