North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Alan Haigh <alandhaigh@gmail.com>]

Lee, you always have a high faith in the pedigreed experts- being one yourself, but perhaps because of my lack of initiation and having been raised by a highly fallible pedigreed expert (in another field) I am somewhat more skeptical.  Of course, I also have a bit of a problem with authority.

 

Since blight arrived in my neighborhood every gardener around me has had to deal with it every year for the last 14 years and no one around me grows potatoes.  We are also some distance apart as I'm a quarter mile from the next vegetable garden.  I never buy my tomato plants and always start them from seed as do several of my neighbors.

 

It is always the same dance- more rain- more and earlier blight.  This is the most early summer and late spring rain any of us can remember so my tomatoes look exactly as I would expect them to.  I have tried all the tricks of black plastic or mulch to keep off splashing but the only thing that makes a difference for me is keeping rain off the plants.  I have even brought blighted plants in under plastic and had the blight reverse.

 

When I was in hort-shcool we had a saying "the pathologist will aways find his pathogen".  What it meant was that basically the pathogen is the symptom.  The horticulturist, therefore, finds the cause (egocentric, I know).

 

For those of you who don't know, I am in Z6 northeastern NY.