Strange year for tomato blight

[Chantal]

I've now taken out all my tomato plants, but have found it very odd this year. In previous years when I haven't sprayed, once blight hit a plant, that was the end of it and the plant was brown/black/dead within what seemed like hours.

For the past two years I have sprayed with Bordeaux Mixture and have managed to achieve a huge crop of tomatoes. However, there are signs of blight here and there where the spray has missed. What I find amazing is that some of the stems are totally blighted, but new (unsprayed) growth came from above the damage. I've had totally blighted fruit hanging next to perfect unblighted fruit, none of which has been sprayed in nearly 2 months.

I've also had a few blighted tomatoes mixed in with those I picked to ripen, but it's only been maybe 10 fruit in 8 crates of tomatoes and nothing around them has succumbed.

In previous years, one blighted tomato in a box took out most of those surrounding it. Nothing previously grew once blight had hit the stem of a plant.

I'm not alone with this situation, the guy on the plot behind me had the same thing, as (I think) has Seedling.

What's going on?

[The Mouse]

Hi Chantal,

I've noticed the same thing here. When i removed a blighted truss about five weeks ago and saw signs of blight further into some of the stems, I imagined it was only a matter of time before I lost the lot. That's what's happened in the past.
Yet here we are, mid-October, and the plants are still going strong. I've not lost even one more tomato to blight since then
I've put it down to the fact that it's been so dry for the past month, but it still seems odd - but nice odd

[Johnboy]

Hi Chantal,
The trouble with Potatoes and Tomatoes is that they suffer from so many different diseases that have almost the same symptoms. The blight incident hereabouts has been exceedingly low in Potatoes and people have therefore not had the blight in their Tomatoes.
It could be that what you thought was blight was actually one of the other diseases that are not as fatal as is blight. Only a thought mind!
JB.

[Chantal]

I'm sure it was blight JB, there's no doubt in my mind at all. Apart from the three of us that sprayed, the potatoes and tomatoes on site were wiped out some months ago. The blighted fruit I have now is exactly the same as every other incidence of blight I've seen. I'll take a photo if I can and post it on here; I wish I'd taken some of good/bad plants but I have pulled them all up.

[Johnboy]

Hi Chantal,
I believe you. It was only a thought. I just wondered why there was a difference in the habit and that mystified me.
JB.

[Chantal]

The same thing happened to my parent's plants in Leicester. I'd been warning them that blight was about but my stepfather was holding off on the spraying, left it too late and they were hit. He sprayed, cut out the damage, and the plants survived. My mum was saying that she had plants with damaged stems with new growth above. I didn't believe it until it happened to my plants too.

My tomato patch looked a right sight at the end as I would guess that all the plants had about 25% of the leaves/stems with blight, a very little of the fruit was also affected and the rest of the fruit was fine, with lots of new growth coming. What really floored me was finding a very blighted tomato growing up against a healthy tomato that never did develop blight (I left some to watch).

I've never seen anything like it.

[glallotments]

We had tomato blight in our plot greenhouse that killed off everything last year. This year as soon as I saw any signs I removed the leaves but some patches remained on the stems. The tomatoes continued to ripen just fine and as you say new shoots appeared. We didn't spray at all and grew a mixture of varieties. They spare plants growing outside were left to their own devices and all died.

[ken]

I agree, it has been a strange year for blight. We didn't get any until the very end of August, beginning of September. Then, outdoors, Marmande got it quite badly. I put this down to it being a bush variety, and therefore poorer air flow and greater opportunity for humid air to get trapped. There was a little on the cordon varieties, and also on Latah, which is a very open bush. Unfortunately, I can't really say whether they would have fought off the infection as we harvested everything as usual once we had spotted the blight. In the greenhouse, no definite blight. Where the rain leaks in a bit there were a few marked leaves that looked suspiciously like blightj, but it didn't spread.
Two thoughts. First, I understand that blight has been a major problem only in the last few years, when a more vicious strain became established. Could it have mutated again into something less lethal? Second, one reason I didn't spray this year was because I kept a close eye on the local BBC weather reports and forecasts, and the humidity levels have been very low here in Kent all summer. I don't think I spotted any 'Smith periods' where the humidity is high for 48 hours and blight is reckoned to be more or less inevitable. Not very scientific, I knoiw, but what do the experts think?

[Primrose]

I also noticed a little blight on a couple of my tomato plants despite spraying and also found it strange that the blight didn't spread and that fresh new growth was unaffected. I don't know whether it was due to climatic conditions not being as conducive to the spread of it this year or whether in fact the disease has mutated as somebody else has suggested. I also picked off a clump of tomatoes where one fruit was affected and the disease didn't spread to the others, even though all fruits were touching each other. I wonder whether the dryness has contributed to the lack of spread in that blight spores have not been washed further over the plants as they might have been in earlier years where we've had a lot more rain.

[WestHamRon]

I've used Bordeaux Mixture for the first time this year and for the first time have had no blight. Please don't start telling me that it is not the BM that has kept me blight free, but better weather or mutated blight !