With my perverse interest in pests and pathogens, I find blight quite interesting. And this year has been especially interesting, as both the crop and the disease thrived.
This year has been a good year for tomatoes, but also a good year for blight. Blight, Phytophthora infestans, is a fungal infection, spread by spores in water droplets. Affected tomatoes develop brown, sunken patches, which spread to the stems and the leaves of the plants.
With my perverse interest in pests and pathogens, I find blight quite interesting. And this year has been especially interesting, as both the crop and the disease thrived.
Next year, Suttons Seeds is launching a new tomato called 'Hundreds and Thousands', and I was lucky enough to be given a trial pack of seeds. It's a funny variety, with low-growing plants covered with numerous marble-sized fruits. I grew one plant unsuccessfully in the greenhouse and many very successfully outside in pots.
My children found the tomatoes had too much skin for the quantity of flesh, but then they've become serious critics of the vegetable world in recent years. What struck me was that, while the plants did get blight, they got it much later than the other varieties I was growing, and when they did get it they seemed to carry on producing fruits, despite the infection. They're still growing now - I wouldn't say they are thriving, but they are still alive and cropping.
So my verdict on this new variety is that the plants look pretty and they appear to have some resistance to blight. It looks like my kids will just have to get used to them!
Gardeners' World Web User
12/10/2008 at 13:46
I grew lots of tomatoes (31 plants!) as a bit of an experiment. The best were the free Gardener's World ones! However, all my plants succumbed to blight. Normally, I's use the contents of the grow bags on my raised beds.
Is it safe to use the compost from the growbags of blighted tomatoes if I am not planning to grow tomatoes or potatoes in my beds?
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