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Late Blight – Myths and Misinformation

Allegory-of-immortality-1179

Late blight is the nemesis of tomato growers, especially in the damp climate of the coastal Pacific Northwest. Many sources of gardening advice include a lot of misinformation about managing late blight.  For authoritative sources of good information, I recommend:
Managing Late Blight.
Managing Late Blight in Organically-Produced Tomatoes

Myths –

  • Crop rotation is essential because late blight spores survive in the soil over winter. False. Currently, in the US, the late blight pathogen can only survive on living host plant tissue. This is because blight fungi have two different modes of reproduction, only one of which is presently observed in the US. Late blight can reproduce either sexually, or asexually. Sexual reproduction requires the presence of both A1 and A2 mating types (equivalent to male and female sexes). Sexual reproduction produces oospores, which can survive over the winter, in soil for example.  However only the A2 mating type (sex) exists in most of the US.  Therefore, late blight can only reproduce asexually. Asexual reproduction produces zoospores, which are much less hardy than oospores, and can only survive for a few hours outside of living host (tomato or potato) tissue.
  • Seeds from late blight infected tomatoes will produce infected plants.  False. Late blight zoospores do not survive on tomato seeds.
  • Stakes used for tomatoes must be disinfected before re-use to prevent spread of late blight. False. Zoospores cannot survive for more than a few hours on solid surfaces such as stakes.
  • Late blight infection is caused by spores present in the soil, so contact of tomato plant leaves with the soil must be prevented. False. Zoospores cannot survive in soil. Zoospores are spread almost entirely by air-born dispersal of spores released by living infected plants.
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Starts started (II)

In my last post I touted my cable-heated gravel bed for starting plants. Forget that – my Gro-Quick 48 Ft Soil Heating Cable failed after only one season of use.  Thanks to Gro-Quick my starts are about a week behind where they should be. In the end, to get them started, I put a couple lamps with IR heating bulbs above my plants.  All but two of my 126 varieties are now sprouted.

Baby heirlooms
Baby heirlooms

 

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It’s time to sow tomatoes!

I have used various systems to decide what date to sow tomatoes.  Choosing the correct date for indoor sowing requires predicting how soon consistently warm weather will arrive in the Spring, and this varies tremendously from year to year.  This year I have adopted a new system  I sow when my dog Lucy starts to actively shed her winter coat.  Today’s the day!

Lucy looses her fur
Lucy looses her fur
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Hippy dippy prune drying

My three Italian prune plum trees are loaded with ripe fruit, so it is time to dry them to make prunes. The picture shows my system for drying the plums.  The plums are sliced in half and the pits are removed.  The fruit is placed on drying racks, and the racks are placed on my green house.  Under a hot Autumn sun, the temperature in the greenhouse reaches 110 degrees.  I use a 5W solar panel to power a small 12 V DC fan rescued from a dead computer.  The fan blows on the hot plums, speeding the drying process.  The same system works great for making sun-dried tomatoes.Solar plum drying

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Saving tomato seeds

This is my setup for collecting and drying tomato seeds.  I cut tomatoes in half and squeeze juice and seeds into a small jars or bottles.  These are allowed to sit for 2 or 3 days.  The resulting fermentation releases the seeds from the gel in which they reside in the fruit. It is not unusual for shocking mold growth to occur during the fermentation, but this does not cause any problem.  After fermentation I fill the bottles or jars with water, shake a couple times and allow the seeds to settle.  I pour off most of the liquid, add water and repeat the shaking/settling process. After several cycles of washing in this manner the seeds are completely clean. They are poured into a sieve to remove the water, and then transferred onto a piece of tempered glass, where they are allowed to dry. Drying takes from 1 to 3 days, depending on the temperature and humidity. Usually 1 day is enough if the drying seeds are left outside in the shade on a warm sunny day.

Seeds

And might I mention, the germination rate for tomato seeds I buy from various commercial sources ranges from 80% to 0% (and I won’t name any names) whereas the seeds I produce myself using the method described invariably have a germination rate of 95%-100%.

One last piece of advice – tomatoes are self-fertile, so they tend to breed true even if different varieties of tomatoes are grown close together.  My experience with different tomato varieties grown spaced only 3 feet apart is that cross-breeding occurs about 5% of the time, with the seeds faithfully maintaining the characteristics of the plant from which the fruit was picked the remaining 95% of the time.  If you need to be absolutely sure that cross-breeding never occurs (as is necessary for commercial seed production) plants either need to be spaced far apart, or manual artificial pollinization needs to be performed.  A 5% failure rate is perfectly acceptable for home growers – the occasional accidental cross-breeding may even yield an interesting new variety!

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I Love My Remay

For the last 15 years each year it has been a competition with the birds to see whether they or I pick the most blueberries, but I never really knew how much the birds were getting. I never had a yield of more than 3 pounds of berries from my three bushes during this period and the berries never lasted on the bushes for more than a week. This year, for the first time, I shrouded the bushes in Remay as soon as the berries started to ripen. Amazingly, I have picked 20 pounds so far, over a period of 2 weeks, and the bushes are still completely loaded with berries, so it looks like the Remay has increased my yield about ten-fold.
blueberries

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Csikos Botermo

Tomatofest lists this Hungarian heirloom as a late maturing variety and says Csikos Botermo translates as “striped good cropper”. Abundant Acres indicates it is an early variety and suggests the name as “early variety of Hungarian cowboys”. The only thing they agree on is that the fruit is striped. Although I prefer the colorful Abundant Acres translation, I am afraid Tomatofest has it right as Google Translate indicates that “csíkos bőtermő” means “striped, high yielding”. On the other hand, I must agree with the “early” designation by Abundant Acres. This year, Csikos Botermo was the 4th earliest variety to ripen in my collection of 118 varieties..Csikos Botermo