My tomatoes all got blight! It’s a fungus, I’m told. The back yard has been INSANELY WET this year, and that probably helped the fungus grow. I still got very nice looking tomatoes, and I’ll still get a bunch more, but the plants are dying quickly…very, very quickly.
Patch of 12 tomatoes in late July. Dying of blight fungus.
Clockwise from the closest corner…Rutgers, Super Marmande, Gardener’s Delight, Cold Set and the mystery pear tomato that snuck into my seed packet.
Closer shot of the sad, dying tomatoes
The fruit doesn’t have a problem…it’s just the green leaves of the vine that are dying. I’ve already harvested 24 pounds of tomatoes from these 12 plants and I expect to get almost that much more before they are completely dead.
Gardener’s Delight cherry tomato doing slightly better than the rest.
I actually doubt I’ll grow these fun cherry tomatoes next year. My main use for them is in canned stuff and it’s a pain to peel and seed these smaller ones. They aren’t a tiny cherry tomato…some are golf ball size…but still, it’s a lot more work to get 10 cups from these little guys than it is from bigger fruits.
Gardener’s Delight Cherry Tomato
It’s hard not to love these guys though. Very attractive, very prolific, very tasty and pretty large as cherry tomatoes go.
Close-up of Gardener’s Delight Cherry tomatoes
Posted by Robin on July 30, 2008 at 3:13 am
You might be able to buy the plants some time by completely stripped off the diseased leaves, bagging them and putting them out for trash collection. On a dry day, mulch around the plants with fresh straw. The straw will keep the fungus from splashing up on the plants. Stripping the leaves will increase air flow, critically important to tomato plants. When you water try to avoid splashing any water around the plants. What a summer. We got 2″ of rain today.
Posted by sjones71 on July 30, 2008 at 10:51 am
Same stinking thing happened to my tomatoes. The disease was pretty rampant and I had plucked as many leaves as I could from about 8 plants. It was spreading so I needed to rip them out. Fresh mulch, soaker hose for the remaining plants and we’ll see how it goes.
Posted by Shae on August 5, 2008 at 6:36 pm
I’m sorry. I hope you can save some of them.
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