Tomato Blight In Pennsylvania
Tomato blight struck Pennsylvania in 2009 and the results were less than wonderful. I spent lots of time radically pruning infected leaves from my blighted tomato plants and removing infected fruit, which greatly reduced the yield. I could hardly keep up with it.
Blight is a fungus that infects tomatoes and potatoes and is caused by cool, wet conditions. It took until mid-August to see a 90+ degree day in Pennsylvania (very, very late) and June and July were literally a wash: June’s rainfall was nearly three inches above normal and July’s was more than 1.6 inches above normal, while temperatures hovered well below their normal range for the entire season.
These weather conditions created a “perfect storm” for blight (and other fungi) which spread like mad. One local organic farmer told me that his entire field of heirloom tomatoes was wiped out – he had to destroy them all. He also said the rumor was that one grower who supplied plants to big box stores was responsible, a statement that seems to be validated in some of the following articles:
Morning Call Penn State Master Gardeners Blog
If you’re unlucky enough to find that blight has struck your tomatoes, do not compost any fruit, leaves or stems from these plants and do not save the seeds. Bag or burn them to avoid carrying the infection over to the next season.
One last thought: all of my infected plants were in my raised beds, where I planted seedlings of various types (bought from a nursery). However, the “volunteer” plants which sprang up in my flower beds from composted tomato seeds showed little to no sign of infection. Fortunately, I just let them grow where they popped up, or I would have had very few tomatoes. The closest “volunteer” to my raised beds was about 20 feet, which showed some symptoms, but the volunteers that grew 30 feet or more away from the blighted plants showed no signs of blight at all.
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