Kitchen Garden Forum

My tomatoes have again been infected with blight. I've dug up the plants and binned them and I believe I should now sterilize the soil. Can you recommend anything? Somebody mentioned Jeyes fluid but I'm not sure if that's allowed any more.

I did use a very light watering of Jeyes Fluid one year when I lost my entire tomato crop in the space of a week but I've never read anything definitive about how long any spores are capable of remaining in the soil.

If you're growing them outdoors I would be tempted to dig the soil over thoroughly and try to expose as much as possible to wind, rain and air in the hope that this will kill the spores over winter. .

I've been alternating the position for my climbing bean and outdoor tomato crops every year so they're never grown in exactly the same soil two years on the run. Generally this seems to have worked well and even in blight years I've not really had any young tomato plants show any sign of blight in their early growing period before any official blight warnings have been issued and spores may have drifted in from the general atmosphere in prevailing winds. .

I suspect vulnerability to blight may well depend more on weather conditions prevailing at the time rather than spores in the soil which may be killed over the winter by low temperatures, heavy rain or frosts. I'd certainly never put any blighted tomato stems or foliage anywhere near a compost heap though.

jeyes is not recommended for soil sterilisation where edible crops are grown, I use it to wash the greenhouse windows, but not the soil as we used to do back in the dim and distant past.

I believe that late blight spores do not live in the soil. Once the host plants are dead or removed they can't survive as have no host plant; however they can continue if it is your spuds affected & you don't get up every potato.

Our allotment has suffered with blight for the last three years this year we’ve been ok ,I now only grow blight resistant tomatoes the seeds are very expensive and you get few for your money last year I had one plant that seemed to have got it I cut one leaf off that seemed to be suffering and the plant recovered,I also lost all my spuds even after cutting the tops off and leaving for three weeks I still got very little ,funny thing is I grow tumbling toms in hanging baskets these never suffer,

My theory is that growing bush tomatoes in hanging baskets allows the breeze to disperse the spores of blight. My experience is similar but keeping the toms alive this year in the drought was a challenge.