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nafex - Re: [NAFEX] tomato blight

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  • From: "Kieran &/or Donna" <holycow@frontiernet.net>
  • To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] tomato blight
  • Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:32:47 -0500

Mt. Pinatubo went off in 1992 and here in Tennessee we had a dull cloudy drizzly summer. It didn't rain all that much really, but the sun never came out so things never dried off. Hoeing the garden meant simply moving the weeds. We always have early blight here, it's a fact of life for most gardeners. But in '92 there was late blight here, and it blighted the later blossoms. People who planted their tomatoes late had no fruit at all. All our plants were from seed, grown on a field that we had plowed for the first time in years. The blight was everywhere that year. If it came to most gardens on nursery plants, the conditions for blight to grow on the plants had to be there in the nursery. In the south, it tends to be too hot and dry for late blight to grow except for late fall as rain and dropping temps are stressing the plants to death anyway.
I had planted 50 volunteers of a rather so-so "2-bite" cherry type that proved to be quite blight resistant for both me and someone I'd given seeds to. They cropped till frost while all other varieties wimped out early. I'm growing that variety ("Yellow Star") again for the first time in several years, planted them late so they aren't cropping yet. We too are having a wet year, a great relief after 2 severe drought years alternating with barely adequate years. If late blight hits here and wipes out my other plants early, I have no doubt I'll have late tomatoes from the Yellow Star plants. Hopefully I'll have seeds to share if some of you have annual trouble with late blight. It's nothing to jump up and down about, not bad but not great. On the other hand, I compared production one year to a favorite variety, "Pink Ping Pong" which is the same size. The yellow stars made 4X the crop per plant as the ping pongs. Donna




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