Tomato Growing Thread 2021

Does blight only come from getting the leaves of the tomatoe plant wet then???

 

Reasonably warm damp conditions are ideal for blight.
Those wet summer days when it just never seems to dry up, or a few days of drizzle with no wind to dry things out and everything just hangs with water.

 

So growing in my greenhouses will be ok next season then….even though i have bought blight resistant tommy seeds for next year

 

Its not impossible to get blight in a greenhouse but the chances are lower, especially with good ventilation.

 

It will have two windows each side and on one end……..so plenty of ventilation in there. I may even have the door made with enviromesh instead of glass yet, but not 100% sure on that

 

Well theres defo no potato farming anywhere nearby and as far as i know, only myself in the nearly 20 houses around me, growing my own fruit and veg. But it does get humid up here in the summer months

 

I can't actually understand that @JWK ,my thinking is that farmers probably spray spuds to prevent blight, so surely their crops are not spreading blight.

 

When I was growing up (Linconshire) a lot of it used to come from dumps of damaged, rotten potatoes. Sometimes you used see a ditch full of potato plants.
The advantage of a greenhouse as well as ventilation is the dry atmosphere as the blight spores need a film of water to germinate in and then spread in to the tomato/potato plant. So the absence of dew, rain on leaves reduces infection rate.
The spores spread very readily on the wind and this is probaply the main route of infection.

 

The only potato growing going on around here is down on Romney Marsh, which is a fair distance away.

I do get the wind bourne idea, but I can't help thinking that I grew tomatoes in the 70s and 80s and although I had heard of blight I never saw any, in fact I wasn't sure what it looked like.
Then one wet summer it struck and I've never been totally free of it since.

I can't help thinking it's over wintering on something or somewhere and just reinfects the next season.

 

I suspect farmers don't fork over their fields after harvesting to remove all the spuds their machines have left in the ground, and in the spring digging out all the volunteer spuds they've missed sprounting amongst their next crop, plus at allotments I see blighted tubers getting chucked onto disused plots, into margins, hedges, etc., or even overwintering in compost heaps.