It’s amazing the things you learn when you’re forced to. Planting tomatoes seemed like it would be the easiest thing in the world: get some seedlings from the local plant barn, wack them in pots, water, feed, wait and harvest. Yes, well…nothing is that simple! Welcome to the world of blight!
I started noticing a horrible black spot on all the little tomatoes that had come up. My first thought was that they were getting bitten by something (we have lots of slugs/snails) but there was no way to know for sure. I took a few samples to the above mentioned plant barn to get a professional opinion. I had the wounded tomatoes in a plastic bag. I walked up to a yellow-uniformed plant barn staff member and before I could even ask the question “What’s wrong with my tomatoes?” he simply stated “Blight”.
According to him there is a lot of early blight due to the extreme warm and humid weather we had a month or two ago. I was the fourth person that day with the problem. The solution: spray with a copper fungicide. I chose pure liquid copper. I have to spray once a week to prevent the dreaded blight from returning. He stressed that it was very important to remove all the infected bits of plant and destroy them (he said to burn them). I removed most of the existing tomatoes and some infected stems and leaves.
So far things are looking up. Hopefully we’ll be eating home grown tomatoes before too long, and if I have more tomatoes I can deal with I intend to make my own ketchup!