By now, most home gardeners are well aware of the tomato blight that has just about wiped out all tomato and even potato production in the northeast. Our garden has been similarly affected. If you have a garden or think that one day you just might plant one, reading these two articles is a must:
Tomato Blight in Northeast Aided By Home Gardeners
Outbreak of Fungus Threatens Tomato Crop
As in many large-scale disasters (e.g. hurricane Katrina, airlines disaster, etc.), the scale of the destruction here can be attributed to a series of mistakes or weaknesses in a large system. In this case, we have the following:
- a combination of many new home gardeners (who want to eat locally-produced food)
- large chain stores such as Wal-Mart, Lowes and Home Depot that sell plants but don’t adequately inspect for disease
- an unusually cool, wet summer
Put all these elements together and you have a blight that got out of control. It’s very important that we learn from this. I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to lose the tomato crop next year.
So these are the lessons I’m taking from this:
- Buy from small, local nurseries where you know the grower and you know him or her to be picky about selling only healthy plants
- Or start your own tomatoes from seed. Why not look for seeds locally, or from a group of seed-savers? (Make sure they’re not GMO-contaminated seeds! Monsanto will sue you!)
- Start tomatoes under some kind of protection so they’re strong early in the season
- Talk with other gardeners and keep up with the news
- At the first sign of disease, deal with it! I believe I could have saved my heirlooms, which were doing great (I bought them from Harris Seeds in Rochester) if I’d torn out my Romas (which I bought at a hardware store) when I first noticed something was going wrong.
About.com says this is what to do with your infected plants:
“DO NOT COMPOST INFECTED PLANTS!
“To best prevent the spreading of spores, put a black plastic garbage bag over the infected tomato plant, then pull tomato plant out by the roots. Make sure entire plant is in the bag and seal it. To kill the pathogen, so it can’t spread, leave the bag in the sun. Then dispose of the bag, preferably directly into landfill.”
Following are pictures of the fungus among us. Hold the mouse over the picture to see descriptions of what you’re looking at. Click to see bigger versions. Hit your browser’s back button to return to this page.
How are you coping with the lack of tomatoes this year?
Just starting to have the same problem. All of a sudden all the plants are starting to brown and die. It’s very unfortunate. We’re basically picking all the green tomatoes and either making green salsa or pickling them (better than letting them go to waste!). I think next year we’ll be giving our plants a lot more breathing room, and making sure to never get them wet while watering (which helps).
Unfortunately, this year’s blight, once it got started, was devastating and so wide-spread that you couldn’t have protected your plants. I agree that tomatoes need lots of room and it’s better not to water the plants, but this year, even that wouldn’t have saved them. Also, a good trick for tomatoes is, if you are washing out a milk jug, water your tomatoes with the milky water. It is a good fungicide and gives the plants some nutrition.
I too have mountains of green tomatoes. I guess it’s time to get creative with them.
only got about 3 good tomatoes this year. they were disposed of properly, but still very unfortunate. personally, i don’t think there was enough publicized about this problem in the media in the northeast.
thanks for the info and links though!
We brought very large somewhat blighted tomatoes in to ripen. But I wasn’t sure we should be eating them, even the good parts. Click on my name in this comment to get to an article that says NOT to CAN them. Or better still, look at this page from the Cornell Cooperative Extension:
http://plantclinic.cornell.edu/FactSheets/lateblight/late.htm
Regarding eating them fresh, one of the fact sheets deals with the eating of blighted tomatoes and potatoes and says, in part, the following:
“The conclusion that unaffected tissue is safe to consume if diseased sections are adequately removed is based on several points. This pathogen does not produce a toxin that can make people sick, as a few plant pathogens can do. Plant pathogens cannot infect people. No food safety issues have been found with other diseases that affect tomato fruit or potato tubers. Late blight appears to be like other more common diseases, e.g. anthracnose on tomato fruit and pink rot of potato (which incidentally is caused by Phytophthora erythroseptica, a pathogen related to that causing late blight), in that these do not appear to affect plant tissue beyond the area of infection. Many home gardeners likely often cut off diseased tissue rather than throw out the entire fruit or tuber having found the healthy appearing part of these to taste fine. To date, this practice has not been associated with any human health issues.”
I’ve talked to two neighbors who said they got tomatoes this year. The one thing they have in common: they planted their tomatoes ridiculously early and covered them on frosty spring nights. So their tomatoes ripened before the late blight set in. Next year’s tomatoes will have to go in a different bed because this year’s beds have the blight in them. I think I’ll create a little greenhouse for them and plant really early. What will I put in all that space that I had devoted to tomatoes? Garlic and onions! We eat a lot of both and the garlic lasts so well when properly dried and hung.