California got a bumper crop of tomatoes. In the East, blight set in at oversize nurseries and caused havoc.
By John Lyons
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Tuesday, 15 September 2009 |
10:51
Southern California got a bumper crop of tomatoes this summer. Credit: Martha Rose Shulman
Nothing signifies the height of summer like the heavenly scent of a vine-ripened tomato. Even the laziest gardener will invariably manage to get a few tomatoes into the ground each summer maybe along with some basil.
But on the East and West Coasts, the results were radically different this year. Southern California has seen a bumper crop of the humble tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) -- a welcome turnabout from 2008's hiccups caused by a heat spike during the June flowering. Meanwhile on the East Coast a late tomato blight has wreaked havoc on both domestic and commercial crops.
Planning to Plant?
When you are thumbing through your seed cataloge this winter, consider the following wonderful selections:
Brandywine OTV (Off the Vine)
Carmello
Jaune Flamme
Cherokee purple
Japanese triefele
Sungold
Kellog's Breakfast
Early Girl
Celebrity
Green Zebra
I saw it first-hand during a recent trip to New York. I stayed at a friend's farm in Pawling, where she has a wonderful old walled garden and usually a fine crop of tomatoes well under way by mid-August. This time a sea of wilted and wasted tomato plants awaited me.
The outbreak exposes the hazards of having huge nurseries supply vast numbers of starts for commercial growers and urban gardeners. One source of this late blight was Bonnie Plants, which supplies big box stores such as Lowe's and Home Depot. Many of those plants, sold early in the season, were in the ground before the blight was discovered. By then it was too late. Wet and humid weather compounded the problem by facilitating the spread of the fungus-like spores.
Late blight (Phytophthora infestans) -- the same pathogen that caused Ireland's1840s potato blight -- can reside permanently in the soil. By season's end all tomatoes might have a modicum of blight but not enough to really affect the main crop. The disease-carrying spores spread rapidly, however, so blight is very difficult to contain once established. Hot dry weather can slow or contain an outbreak -- but that's not what the east coast got this summer.
Late blight spreads quickly via spores. Credit: Meg McGrath
"Plants can be killed quickly when late blight is not managed," says Meg McGrath, associate professor of plant pathology at Cornell University. "A spot (lesion) can form within four days of when a spore lands on a plant -- even faster, less than three days, with one strain. A day later it can be producing spores that can be dispersed by the wind to healthy plant tissue, resulting in more spots within a few days. Lesions that develop on stems are especially destructive."
For the domestic gardener, the ongoing solution is crop rotation. Don't grow tomatoes in the same garden bed where blight may have been present. Planting a winter crop, or applying green manure are two excellent ways of cleansing the soil of lingering pathogens.
Careful disposal of affected plants is also important. Gardeners who discover blight must destroy the plants by burning them, or putting them in a tightly sealed garbage bag left to sit in the sun for a week or more. Those are the only ways to destroy the spores. Do not compost blighted tomato plants under any circumstances.
A gardening colleague of mine, Trey Pistenberger, was one of the first to report on this outbreak in the gardening blog world. He is a tireless advocate for the small local nursery owner and says, "I think this whole affair proves that box stores work to reduce the choices for the customer. Less choice means fewer suppliers to deal with. Those few suppliers become bigger and bigger, and find that less choice -- no heirlooms next year -- means fewer problems. Of course when something does go wrong, it goes wrong in a big way."
There's a huge potential for smaller garden centers that can fill a niche, Pistenberger adds, by supplying more varieties from smaller suppliers, and providing expert advice.
Pistenberger makes a very good point. Those of us who frequent farmers markets have come to love true heirloom and unusual tomato varieties. But we can only get them for our garden if we buy the seeds or find a smaller nurseries that stocks a wide range of plants.
So in preparation for next season here are a few pointers in helping you have the best tomato crop possible.
Buy healthy, well-rooted plants free of any foliage blemishes.
Prepare your soil with rich compost and a good organic vegetable fertilizer.
Do not plant too soon. Make sure that the soil has warmed up and that a late frost is not a possibility.
Allow at least 30 inches between plants. They need room to grow and space for air circulation.
Stake your plants well. They will grow tall and need good support to prevent loss of fruit.
Water deeply and infrequently avoiding getting the foliage wet. This helps in the prevention of disease.
Feed mid season with a low-nitrogen liquid feed such as fish emulsion.
...
Nancy
As always there are two camps. One group believes the disease arises spontaneously and when weather conditions are "right" as they were this year...very wet and humid the result is a near total crop failure. The other camp holds that the disease gets a foothold though Garden Centers and distribution of plants on a mass scale. The truth, as usual, I think lies somewhere in the middle. One thing for sure is that the disease spreads really rapidly and gardeners need to thoroughly dispose of all dieased plants and be proactive when they have it in their garden.
johnlyons ,
September 27, 2009
...
John, this is very interesting but I have a suspicion that the box stores are not the perpetrators of this. Or maybe not entirely to blame. My friend Leslie Land, an expert gardener if there ever was one, lost all of her tomatoes in both her gardens, the one in the Hudson valley and the one on the coast of Maine. (Why does she have two gardens so far apart? Don't ask--there's a whole novel in there somewhere!) These were grown from seed, very carefully cultivated, some grafted onto what she thought was disease-resistant stock, using organic-accepted sprays and fertilizers, and yet she, like almost everyone I know in the northeast, lost everything except cherry tomatoes. So what makes cherry tomatoes resistant? It's weird but obviously we'll be seeing lots more of this if the human community doesn't get its act together to halt global climate change. Nancy Jenkins
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As always there are two camps. One group believes the disease arises spontaneously and when weather conditions are "right" as they were this year...very wet and humid the result is a near total crop failure. The other camp holds that the disease gets a foothold though Garden Centers and distribution of plants on a mass scale. The truth, as usual, I think lies somewhere in the middle. One thing for sure is that the disease spreads really rapidly and gardeners need to thoroughly dispose of all dieased plants and be proactive when they have it in their garden.