Kitchen Garden Forum

Some leaves on my tomatoes look distinctly like they have blight, but it is well over a week since I found it & there is no real spread & my past experiences of blight is it spreads rapidly to the fruit & the plant is pretty much a goner in this time. I also haven't had any blight warnings & weather just hot not particularly humid & we've had no rain.

What has happened is that I think I have had a critter having a doze in them as they were all pulled of their canes and laying in the dirt & a cucumber was dug up. I couldn't get down there for several days so they could have been on the ground this long - do you think this May have caused some black spots on the leaves, or hideous thought but could they have been peed on?

Westi

I have brown dying leaves on some of my tumbling bush tomato plants and have been franticallyy pulling them off thinking it was b,ifht but I suspect, despite watering it may just been the heat that is causing them to die back. I would have expected this to have spread to my nearby indeterminate tomato plants by now had it been blight and so far nothing seems to have happened. I also have had no blight warnings so am keeping my fingers crossed and just checking every day. Certainly there is nothing on any of the stems which is where I think you can be more certain of blight because dying lower leaves can tend to happen anyway naturally in hot weather or dry periods.

Ive got dying leaves and had to throw another 4 tomatoes away today that are going bad on the truss the bush ones are ok its just the money maker but I still have a lot that are growing nicely

I think there may be a some worm or insect that infected tomato plants.

The leaves on my three bush tomato plants in one border have virtually all shrivelled up with blight yet two others in another border and one in a container are blight free and all my cordon tomatoes seem OK. I'm hoping that I don't return from holiday in due course as I did one year and find that everything has blackened and died while I've been away.

Mine have all came through OK with no new dying leaves & none of the tomatoes were affected so could be the variety or maybe was whatever playful critter bedded down in them.

All's well that ends well as they say & no blight - so far!

Westi

I have spent this afternoon searching the shops for something to spray on my tomatoes to prevent Blight but with no luck. I always used to spray them with a commercial chemical barrier that my son used on the potatoes but now I've retired from growing them I can not find anything for garden use.

Barney

All withdrawn from amateur use Barney.

I was lucky to find some Bordeaux Mixture in a small container of 175g whilst buying Glyphosate from Mole Valley Farmers yesterday and sprayed the tomatoes I have in pots around my patio this morning. Just hope I'm not too late.

Barney

Cider Boys. I am away on holiday and this morning found a hardware shop selling packets of Bayer Garden fruit & vegetable disease control Protective Fungicide so snapped up a packet. The packet cost £5.99 and contains 6 sachets. On the packet one of the diseases it flags up as protecting against is tomato and potato blight. Each sachet makes up 1.6 litres of spray. The active ingredient is listed as 87.7% copper oxychloride (whatever that is). This is the first time this year I've able to find any product claiming to protect against blight. I don't know whether the product is still supposed to be in active circulation but if it,s not and this is just residual stock they still had some packets left and I'll let you have the name of the shop. They may be prepared to post them to you if you're really desperate !

Thanks for the information Primrose but I was able to find some Bordeaux mixture and have now sprayed the tomatoes on my patio together with the patio window that has taken on a blue tint.

Barney

Now it is definitely blight. I have taken as many unaffected off. (or rather more accurately those not showing symptoms). These filled 2 of those plastic mushroom crates but loads more than that lost.

I have washed them all & kept them separate hoping they might ripen a bit then can cook up lots of sauces so won't be wasted but wondered if there was anything specific I could wash them in to kill surface spores or is it just fingers crossed?

Westi

On a previous occasion I picked tomatoes from blighted plants to try and rescue them and washed them in a Dettol solution and sprayed with one of those anti bacterial sprays you clean your worktops with (More in desperation really because that was all I had to hand and I thought "any port in a storm". ) But it wasn't really successful. A few were saved but many more were lost. They mostly turned black before they had time to ripen. I've read that Milton sterilising solution is worth trying but don't know if the person who recommended it found it successful. I suppose if you pick them and perhaps turn them into chutney the same day you might save them but I don't know whether a potentially blighted green tomato would have a "bad" taste. Have never put it to the test.
Really rots your socks, doesn't it, when you've put in all the effort growing them?

I washed all my tomatoes in Milton one year, but it didn't help at all. Most of them still had to be chucked out

I have a mate in spain that drys tomatoes for winter he soaks them in camden tablets dissolved in water it may help