Thursday, March 29, 2012

It's not all sweetness and light, you know!

My veggie garden this year has almost made me want to cry. I mentioned before that it was terrible, well it really was. Summer was a total washout for the first month - it rained ALL the time. We never really got those lovely hot temperatures either, then again it ended with downpours of mammoth proportions. This is not good for the veggie garden at all. My pride and joys ~ the tomatoes ~  have been a disaster. We did get a lot of wee cherry ones for summer salads, but the various large tomatoes only gave me enough to make one batch of passata - woe is me!! They got blight - amazing, spectacular blight. I fought it as long as I could but it was useless.
This was the lot I picked while still green in the hopes that I could ripen them in the potting shed  - by taking them off the plants I hoped that they would be blight free. They were not. I ripened enough to make a very very tiny amount of pasta sauce and that was it.
So folks this is what blight looks like. You can't compost these either as the spores will go into your compost and infect it.

Here's a bit of info...
The early blight fungus can come from many sources. It can be in the soil, it can already be on seeds or seedlings you purchase, it can over-winter in the diseased debris of your tomato plants and it can persist in the soil or debris for at least 1 year. Although early blight can occur in any type of weather, it favors damp conditions, like frequent rain or even heavy dews. (you don't say!)

I'm going to try and burn these tomatoes. Also all the foliage - you need to pick it up off the ground and dispose of it - again I'm going to burn it.

I found that copper helped. In fact I have used an organic copper dust stuff for the last few years and I've not had any blight. Obviously this year the conditions were just too much! Sad, sad, sad.

11 comments:

  1. some sourness and dark helps you really appreciate the successes. Nasty stuff!

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  2. Oh no! How bloody awful.

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  3. Same problem here too, too much rain! On the up side we've had green grass all summer long! :D

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  4. We've had a bad year too Laura which we put down to the weather.

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  5. Hi Laura,
    I had that last year over here in Australia, not fun at all. And although it didn't happen this summer, for some reason our tomato season has been woeful......Fingers crossed for bumper crops this summer?? Please!!

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  6. Yikes! That's horrible! I expect if you garden long enough you'll have a bad year. Blight is some nasty stuff.

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  7. : ( That is lousy.

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  8. Yep, same here. I've been feeding them to the chooks no problem but will burn the vines. Very disappointing eh.

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  9. Oh Laura, what a shame. We have that in our homes in Vancouver and Oxfordshire, can’t get away from the stuff in the tomatoes these days. One trick which an ex neighbour gave me was growing the toms under a sheet of clear corrugated plastic and watering by soaker hose. He always had a huge harvest without much blight at all.

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  10. It made me feel a wee bit better that I'm not the only one! I don;t mean that I'm glad some of you had problems too - honest, just that you all get how sad and demoralising it is!! And yes, the chooks do eat them - so thankfully they're not totally wasted.

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I love it when you leave me comments, it lets me know there are folk out there reading my ramblings! Thank you, I appreciate them loads and loads
Laura x