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All About Late Blight


Petee

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  • 2 weeks later...

Some of my tomato plants have the blight. They were healthy as can be a couple of days ago...now some of them are half dead. We did pull the worst one out and bagged it...I hope we can save a few of them.

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Same here, my 2 plants that the neighbor gave me that he grew from seed were doing awesome, staked them up and had lots of nice tomatoes that I was waiting to turn red. That was 3 days ago, as of yesterday the plants are 1/2 to 3/4 dead, tomatoes have big black spots all over them. I picked 3 that looked ok and scrubed them and put them in a brown paper bag to ripen...was so looking for some home grown tomatoes for BLT's and sammies. :sad:

 

Just checked the ones in the bag...2 of them have big dark spots...tossed them with some cat litter. :cry2:

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I just have tomato speck on my plants. I tried sprays and nothing helped. I was cutting off the dead leaves every day until last week. Then I slacked off. Today I trimmed off a full packed garbage bag of infected dead leaves and now the plants look better but are bare except for a few remaining leaves and lots of green tomatoes. The tomatoes are unharmed and the few ripe ones that I have had so far were tasty. But I definetly would have had lots more tomatoes if my plants wouldn't have gotten infected. I think now with less leaves the plants will get better air circulation and maybe that will help. Some are indeterminates so they might perk up more.

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same with us.....damn i thought we were lucky......will this stay in the soil should i worry about it next year.....things i should do/dont do......as organic as possible....thx :-/

If you destroy the plants properly odds are your soil will be OK next year. Penn State is suggesting putting them in plastic bags and leaving them out in the sun. The old folks around here are saying burn them. If you have the blight in potatoes get them out of the soil and destroy them. Make sure you get all of them. As it stands now the bacteria can only overwinter in infected plant material.

This may change in the future from what I have been reeding. With the new strains coming up from Mexico a different kind of spore may be introduced that will be able to overwinter outside plant material as it will have a hard coating. Just hope this doesn't happen.

My plants are still clear but the cold, wet weather has them looking kind of scrawny.

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That seem to be how it happens.  In two days my beautiful plants started flopping over with the stems turning black.  Ugh.  My daughter has a ton of plants in Portage so maybe you will be able to buy them elsewhere at fruit stands where the blight didn"t hit.

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Just came from my garden in tears, I have the blight on over half of my 72 plants. Guess I know what I will be doing tomorrow. :'(

 

Can I pick off the tomatoes and try to ripen them? Mine aren't even turning yet.

I'm so sorry to hear that it got you too. From what I understand the tomatoes are perfectly safe. You might want to wash them good to keep the spores from destroying the tomatoes. There is no guarantee that the tomatoes aren't already infected and will rot. I know people who have used the green tomatoes for relish. It seems to have gotten just about everybody this year.

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Thanks lavender. I ended up losing more than I had thought I would but did save a couple buckets of the tomatoes. I read that I can dip them in a bleach solution and then wash and dry them to rid the spores and fungus. I am doing this next on my agenda. Had to come in to the a/c to cool off a little after all that work.

 

Anyone have any ripe tomatoes I can buy after they are done with what they want from their garden please remember me.

 

Thanks

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"Wendy's Farm" right on 28 between Brockway and Brookville usually has nice tomatoes for a fair price. I buy from her every year even though I have my own small garden. Sorry about your loss of tomatoes. I would have cried too. Mine have some bacterial speck but the tomatoes are fine, although less than there should be.

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I don't think it has anything to do at all with where you buy them. My mil raised her own plants from seed and they are starting to get it, too. I think it has everything to do with the cool, wet conditions. The only other time I ever had any blight (over a 5 year period) was with this type of cold, damp weather.

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Did you start yours from commercial seeds or purchase them from a wholesale store? Just curious.

 

Mine all of a sudden (over night) have the blight. :-/

 

Nails, I started mine from seeds. We ended up having to pull all of our plants the other day.

 

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Guest snellma

I just called my grape lady in Erie and she said so far all their tomatoes are fine.  They are still green but beautiful.  If anyone wanted to make a day trip to pick they are only $8 a bushel.  Just p.m. me and I will give you the information.  Save some for me though - I don't get there until late Sept.

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I just remembered that I heard about a place in Punxy last year that sells tomatoes that you pick yourself. I was already done canning tomatoes last year when I heard about it. I think I have the phone number somewhere but it will take me days to find it. LOL I think he charged $.19 a pound. He said he started charging by the pound because some people would heap their bushel so full that it took 2 people to carry it while it was so heaped that tomatoes were rolling off. Then other's picked a much smaller bushel. So to make it fair for everyone he started charging by the pound. It sounded like a good deal. I might try that this year if I find the phone number or someone here knows where I am talking about and posts the number. If you have his number please let us know. LOL

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Nails, I started mine from seeds. We ended up having to pull all of our plants the other day.

 

I also started mine from seed. I have the blight.

I thought I read where the Amish  do not have the blight, (don't know if that is really true) which make me wonder what they use for fertilizer.

 

I used Miracle Grow :( I bet they use organic manure.

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I also started mine from seed. I have the blight.

I thought I read where the Amish  do not have the blight, (don't know if that is really true) which make me wonder what they use for fertilizer.

 

I used Miracle Grow :( I bet they use organic manure.

It makes sense that the Amish do not have it. They probably save seed and raise their own tomatoes. Their plants would be clean when they put them out and if they live in communities there might not be any contaminated tomatoes nearby. While the spores can be carried by the wind for a mile odds are you are going to get them from a near neighbor who has a bed case of blight.

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Tomato crops hit by late blight

 

The Late Blight fungus, which destroyed this tomato, was the cause of the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s.

 

Neil Palmer regularly gets down on his hands and knees and crawls among his 1,500 tomato plants in Unity, looking them over with a magnifying glass.

 

Larry King, of Middlesex, spends $50 to $60 on fungicide for each of his two acres of tomato plants after every rain.

 

Both local farmers are vigilantly trying to save their crops from Late Blight, a fungus threatening the state's tomato industry and bringing backyard gardeners to their knees as they weep over dead plants.

 

Late Blight, which has the botanical name Phytophthora infestans, is the same fungus that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s.

 

Beth Gugino, a plant pathologist with Penn State University, said the blight has been confirmed in 40 of Pennsylvania's 67 counties.

 

Barbara Christ, senior associate dean of Penn State's agricultural college, said the impact is going to be "significant," even though commercial growers have tools in their belt not available to backyard gardeners. "They do not have anything that I would call a silver bullet that stops this pathogen."

 

The first signs of the fungus are gray leaves. A couple of days later, the plants are dead.

 

"It's nasty," Mr. King said. "You go out to look at your tomato plants and two days later your plant's dead ... black crisp dead."

 

Mr. King, one of the owners of Harvest Valley Farms, has been spraying fungicide over his 8,000 to 9,000 tomato plants in an effort to save them. Still, there is one row of plants, he said, that juts out a little farther than the others that must not have gotten sprayed as well because they quickly died.

 

Dr. Christ said the pathogen that causes Late Blight has spread along the entire Eastern Seaboard. "This started in Florida and reaches all the way up to Maine," she said.

 

And, while it has been confirmed in only 40 counties, she believes it is probably present throughout Pennsylvania.

 

Much of the spread has been traced to a grower in the South that shipped tomato starter plants to big box home improvement stores along the coast.

 

"Homeowners were buying these plants not knowing they had something that was infected," Dr. Christ said.

 

Late Blight is not poisonous, she said, but once tomatoes or potatoes start rotting, they are dangerous to eat.

 

The cool, damp weather this summer has been perfect for the blight. While farmers know to watch for the disease, home gardeners who do not know about the fungus have seen their crops wiped out.

 

Mr. Palmer lost 30 percent of his first crop to Late Blight. Since then, he has been inspecting the plants with a magnifying glass every two or three days and spraying them about once a week.

 

One big buyer of locally grown produce is Eat'n Park, which gets many of its tomatoes from Mr. King's farm.

 

Kevin O'Connell, spokesman for the restaurant chain based at the Waterfront, said while local farmers have been affected by the pathogen, Eat'n Park has not been hard hit. "At this point it looks like our local farmers have been able to adjust," he said.

 

Penn State has not been able to tally the cost to farmers of crops lost due to the blight, but Dr. Christ said, "I can tell you, it's going to be significant. We have a significant tomato industry that is used for tomato processing in this state."

 

Those tomatoes, she said, are grown to be used in tomato sauces. In 2007, the most recent year for which information is available, the state had a $40.6 million tomato harvest.

 

Potato growers won't know the extent of their losses until fall. The state's crop in 2007 was one-third of what it was in the 1970s, but still there were $22.2 million worth of potatoes grown.

 

Dr. Christ said half of the potatoes in the state are sold in the produce sections of grocery stores. Others are used for items such as potato chips.

 

The produce buyers at Giant Eagle so far have not had a problem obtaining fresh, locally grown potatoes or tomatoes, said Dick Roberts, the O'Hara grocer's spokesman.

 

"Nor do we have any concerns regarding the impact of a blight on the pricing of these products," he said.

 

Pennsylvania's biggest user of tomatoes, the H. J. Heinz Co., does not expect to be affected by the blight.

 

Michael Mullen, a spokesman for Heinz, said the company, which is one of the largest buyers of processed tomatoes in the world, purchases tomatoes grown in California and not affected by Late Blight.

 

Dr. Christ said home gardeners whose tomato plants are killed by Late Blight should pull the plants, bag them in a black plastic bag and leave it in the sun for a few days so the heat will kill the spores.

 

Affected potato plants, she said, should be treated the same way. But since there are often tubers left in the ground -- and the blight can last through the winter underground -- any "volunteer" potato plants that grow in the spring also should be dug up and destroyed. "We have to be vigilant," she said.

 

Late Blight, which has the botanical name Phytophthora infestans, is the same fungus that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s.

 

20090816rad4_tomato_bligh_500_9278.jpg

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