Greenhouse tomatoes with blight

[greenhouse girl]

I have just been reading all your sad tales of blight on your tomato crops and realised that has been the trouble with my greenhouse plants. My question is can I still harvest the green tomatoes before they appear to be infested with the blight to make green tomato chukney? I also have a pumpkin plant in the same patch as the tomatoes will that become infected, and how will it effect my cucumbers which are doing very well and taste great.? Thanks for any help I can get in advance.

[Chantal]

Hi GG

If you harvest all your green tomatoes and use them immediately you have a chance, but even when picked, they can still turn brown and horrible overnight (as mine did).

Last year I tried washing all my (picked)green tomatoes in Milton steralising fluid but it made no difference at all. This year I just binned the lot as the 10lb or so that I hurridly picked all turned nasty in the 24 hours before I could deal with them.

I also made a bad mistake a few years ago when I first encountered blight. I picked the healthy looking green tomatoes on their stems and hung them in the green house to ripen. I infected every one of my indoor plants too.

I wish you luck.

[alan refail]

GG

No problems for cucumbers and courgettes from blight.
You'll need to watch out for powdery mildew possibly, which does affect them. Ah, the joys of gardening

Alan

[WigBag]

My toms developed blight spots on the leaves in the G.H. so I immediately cut off all the affected leaves, wiping my blade between plants with a sanitising wipe. The poor specimens were basically left as a series of leaf less cordons with some fruit clusters.

My daily visits see me taking off any fruit or leaves that looks remotely suspicious and with the improvement in the weather (hot and dry) they appear to have stabilised for now. New leaves even.

Each day a few more have fruit have ripened and so I am having a token harvest, although the fruit has none of the taste explosion of normal years.

[Primrose]

Since spotting some early signs of blight on a couple of my outdoor tomatoes last week I sprayed them all immediatel and snipped off any small parts of affected leaves. I'm now doing a daily patrol and so far the plants seem to be holding their own. But we go on holiday in a week's time. If they're still surviving by then, I will spray a second time and go away fretting that I'll come back to dead plants. I'm really torn as to whether to pull them up or risk it. So far the remainder of my plants look healthy but I'm not counting my chickens. This damned disease just spreads so quickly. Two semi ripe tomatoes I picked off a slightly infected plant were put on the kithcne window sill to ripen but were covered with blighty patches within 48 hours.

[Granny]

Wigbag, I do the same as you, and it's working so far. New sideshoots seem to be unaffected at the moment but I'm not holding my breath. I won't get enough to freeze this year but I might get through the summer.
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Granny

[vivienz]

My toms are slowly succumbing to blight now, having sprayed with dithane through July. As they now have it, I can't be bothered to spray any more. Interestingly, though, I have two short rows of pink fir apple spuds growing right next to them (these were also sprayed, but no more so) and they are completely free of blight. I noticed in previous years that, for whatever reason, my toms always seem to get infected before my spuds. Has anyone else encountered this?
Vivien

[Primrose]

Vivien, I don't grow potatoes, (apart from odd old ones I grow on my compost heap) but the other day we bought a batch of red skinned potatoes from a local supermarket, and this morning I noticed that two of them in my vegetable basket had succumbed to blight.

[alan refail]

I have started threads on blight “resistance” (?) in potatoes and tomatoes on the “Technical Data” Forum.

viewtopic.php?t=4292 - potatoes

viewtopic.php?t=4293 - tomatoes

Please let’s hear of your (good) experiences there, in the hope that we all learn something for next year.

Alan