Protect your tomatoes from the ‘late blight’
Phytophthora infestans.
Have I — on this last holiday weekend of summer — finally beaten the frigging thing?
I sure hope so, because this airborne bacterial scourge, commonly known as “late blight,” means death to ripening tomatoes. And, boy, its behaviour is brutal.
The disease works almost as fast as a hawk swooping out of the sky and pouncing on a terrified mouse, as I found out last year. I went away for a weekend in early September and on my return, every tomato plant was drooping, with mouldy, blackening patches on its stems and fast-shrivelling leaves. And the tomatoes? All goners. They had the strange, hard, brownish (or pale), disfiguring lumps on their skins that are characteristic of late blight — and felt squashy. When I cut one open, it stank.
I practically wept, because this was my third summer in a row of falling victim to this relentless killer.
What to do? It’s difficult, because there is no cure for late blight. The spores get spread by the wind and also stay in the soil. For alarmingly long, it seems. Agrologists worry that the potato crop in Prince Edward Island is now under threat, as spuds belong to the same plant family as tomatoes.
However, there are ways to outwit those wily, wandering spores — and this year, I resolved to give them a try in my garden. Here’s what I did:
First, my fledgling tomato plants, started from seed last March, got a brand new place to grow. Living in the country, I’m fortunate to possess a big veggie plot (where I consistently rotate crops every year.) But this spring, the spade came out and I dug further afield.
Big wooden stakes then went in, to support the tomatoes. The idea was to train them to grow as high off the ground as possible. That’s because experts say the nasty little spores, lurking invisibly in the earth, get “splashed up” on to tomato plants’ leaves when it rains.
Throughout the summer, I kept pinching out suckers and cutting foliage off my burgeoning plants. And in this summer of plentiful rain, that meant getting out the snippers every few days. The plants actually became quite bare, with little but swelling tomatoes left on the stems. The point was to keep air circulating freely around them — because the disease is more likely to develop in damp conditions where leaves are squashed together, with no room to breathe.
I also made sure that not one leaf stayed on a plant where it could droop down and touch the ground — another recommendation by experts.
Has this strategy worked? Hallelujah, YES. At the time of writing (near the end of August) I’m harvesting tons of tomatoes — from half a dozen kinds, both hybrids and heirlooms. What particularly thrills me is that my absolute fave — an heirloom variety called Black Krim, with a dark, seedy interior and delicious flavour — has thus far survived unscathed. And it is notoriously susceptible to late blight.
Even so, I’m vigilantly watching over my “babes,” like that hawk after a mouse. Because I know the spores are lurking nearby too, waiting to pounce at the first opportunity. Have I — phew — won the Battle of the Blight? Stay tuned. soniaday.com