I’ve even tried growing tomatoes outside of the garden in new ground.
I never grow tomatoes in the same place or where potatoes were. Here at the end of August I picked a few cherry tomatoes, but all others are gone. I grew Opalkas, Amish paste, and Juliets for canning Cherokee pink, Brandywine Black, Eva Purple Ball, and Early Girl for eating and Sungolds and Black Cherokees for cherry tomatoes. If you plant further apart you have good air circulation and you have less disease.After this wet summer, I’m wondering if any varieties of tomatoes showed any resistance to the blight (early or late). You also can plant plants further apart unlike this situation where it’s a big jungle which creates an environment for a lot of these diseases to get started. Use disease resistant varieties to prevent the blight. Also, grow disease-resistant varieties of tomatoes. So using disease-resistant varieties and doing some cultural sanitation around the plants are good ways to get great tomato crop without losing a lot of it to blight. Also, do some nice crop rotation and that will actually help slow down the beginning of these tomato blights. A lot of these other diseases such as early blight, septoria leaf spot, bacterial speck… for those simply clean up the garden really well in the fall add compost to that soil. Late bite can be very devastating in a garden so you want to get rid of it. If you get any sprouts coming up from potatoes that you didn’t harvest last year or in the spring with some little sprouted tomatoes, pull those out too. If you have late blight disease on your plant what to do is pull it out of the ground put into the garbage bed and send it away. Spray and then reapply it after a rain is a good way to slow it all down.
But if you spray it on the healthy foliage it will prevent it from spreading to those places. Once you have the disease it’s not really going to stop it. With this spray or with the copper spray, the key is to actually spray it before you have the problem. It fights the fungus that causes a lot of these blights. It’s actually a bacteria called Bacillus subtilis.
There’s certainly a copper spray and there’s one that I really like it’s called Serenade. The idea is to create a little bit of a barrier so when it rains you don’t get that splashing and that’ll slow the onset of the disease. It could be straw or untreated grass clippings. That barrier could be a number of different things. Spores from a lot of these diseases lie in the soil so if you can actually create a barrier between the soil and the plant what will happen is that when it rains those spores won’t splash up onto those bottom leaves and get the disease started. If you get this disease early in the season it can spread throughout the plant and you really cut back on production.
They start out as little spots on the leaves then slowly expand turning the leaf yellow and eventually the leaf will just die. The signs are very similar for a lot of these. It could be septoria leaf spot, early blight, late blight or even bacterial speck. Tomato blight is kind of a big term but actually it could be any number of different diseases that attack the foliage of tomato plants.
Watch this video to learn about the various types of tomato blights and how to prevent them from killing your tomato plants in summer.įor anyone growing tomatoes in the Northeast, Southeast or in the Midwest you know about tomato blight.