Showing posts with label blight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blight. Show all posts

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Late blight



Apparently we've been hit with "late blight." (Don't worry -- the wilted swiss chard is just the standard mid-day reaction to hot weather, not some sort of disease.)

The cool, wet weather we had this spring was a factor in its catastrophic spread.

The only tomato that did not get the blight was a "Matt's Wild Cherry." I had grown this variety years ago, and it hadn't done all that well. As the catalog says, it doesn't yield many tomatoes for the amount of space it takes, and I'd grown fond of the grape tomato varieties that are available now, so I'd stopped growing the wild cherry in favor of the grapes.

This winter, I decided to get rid of seeds I never use, and I had a few of the wild cherry seeds, so, on a whim, I started them indoors. One sprouted, and it went into the garden. Apparently, it has innate resistance to late blight, because it's surrounded by dead plants, and there isn't a single spot on it.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Bit of a setback

So, I was feeling kinda' proud of our gazillion tomato plants and how healthy and fruit-laden they were in a year when the weather has been rotten and lots of people were bemoaning their pitiful plants.

And then the blight struck.

I've never seen plants die so suddenly or so substantially. We're getting some fruits anyway, but many are rotten and the greenery is brownery.

Note to self: Don't count your tomatoes until they ripen.