So you can imagine my surprise when this patch of tomatoes in my main garden appeared to be blight resistant.
Blight hit this garden, and i pulled a ton of tomatoes that were surrounding these...and yet these show no sign of blight. This photo was taken yesterday, the plants look healthy and perfect. They are loaded with bloom and baby tomatoes are just beginning to appear.
i was really starting to feel optimistic, after all the devastation of losing my tomatoes to this retched blight... it looks like i may actually get some tomatoes after all.
So i poked around in the foliage looking for tomatoes, and found this. :( All the new tomatoes are coming like this. Brown, hard and rotting. Every single one.
So i have a garden full of beautiful, perfect looking tomatoes plants...and still no edible tomatoes. i have searched online and can not figure out what is wrong with my tomatoes. Is this still the late blight? Everything i've seen about the blight is that it affects the foliage first, and then later appears on the fruit. So why do these plants show no sign of blight on the foliage, but the fruit is all coming in diseased???
If anyone can tell me what is going on with my tomatoes i would be so grateful.
i wish i could tell you something but i'm at a loss! we grow mass quantities of tomatoes and got wiped out completely the past two years. here's what we have figured out for this year: #1. cherry tomatoes fair well against it as do the volunteer sprouts that pop up on their own, blight resistant varieties still got blight #2 we did the earliest varieties we could find and started picking green as soon as we could to ripen in bags, each picking day was kept separate from the next one, we don't plan on having any vine ripened tomatoes but at least we'll have something to can #3 pull effected plants as soon as you suspect anything and burn, compost deeply in hot compost, or feed to chickens. you could also put in plastic bags and throw away. it "shouldn't" stay in the soil according to the "experts" but the spores can travel for miles in the wind. off to do another picking before it's too late. best wishes and my deepest condolences!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment! i actually had a bunch of cherry tomato volunteers come up, but they all feel victim to the blight before they ever developed tomatoes. i was wondering if it was safe to pressure can the blight tomatoes, everything i read online said it is unsafe. i asked my local extension office, and they needed to confirm with a state specialist...and i never received an answer. i was also curious about feeding them to my chickens, wondering if the spores would end up in the manure, which goes into the compost and then survive the winter. Gah...such a pain. i did find that my Amish paste tomatoes, despite the plant foliage dying and looking terrible, the tomatoes ripened on the vines with very few getting brown spots. thank you for all you info.
DeleteHmm, I'm not an experienced gardener so I'm not sure. We had blossom end rot A(I think) on one of our tomato plants. It starts with a scab on the bottom and then gradually takes the whole tomato. I used this remedy, http://www.jamiecooksitup.net/2010/05/jerry-bakers-magic-tomato-plant-food.html and to my surprise it worked. The tomatoes from that plant are very odd looking but taste really sweet. They ended up being our favorite. I don't know if it would work for other diseases.
ReplyDeletesuch sad tomatoes, I'm not certain what that is, potash is good to encourage fruiting and low nitrogen so they fruit more and leaf less. I'd be pruning out some of those leaves so the air can circulate through. But if it is blight then all your efforts may be in vain. Sometimes if you get some unseasonal weather your tomatoes can suffer, a sudden surge of rain can make them split.
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