late blight massacre

[stonysoilseeds]

im hoping everyones season has been blight free..... my plants are finally in the peak of production and unfortunately more than halfof my planting was suddenly hit with a late blight epidemicinfection.. i am harvesting all the larger tomatoes off the plants .. i know its too late to control this blight infection at this late date but i am planning control for next yr... i realize there are effective fungiscides available but i grow organically and am intersted in any of your successes with this type of control.. i watched a you tube just now on inserting copper wires into the stems of the plants in conjunctin with hydrogen peroxide spraying also usi ng baking soda as a spray have any ou you tomatovillians tried these methods with success.. right now im feeling very bad about my late blight so any help would be appreciated thanks ira

[Cole_Robbie]

I haven't tried it, but I have read about using a 20% milk and water solution. I bet it works like the baking soda you mentioned, in that it raises the ph environment on the leaf, making life harder for the fungal spores.

[RayR]

There was a thread about this copper wire method awhile ago—here.

The whole idea of spearing a perfectly good stem with copper wire as a preventative against blight (especially Late Blight) seems preposterous to me, a kind of garden voodoo certainly not based on any sound science I've ever seen.
The fact that it just keeps resurfacing from time to time like some urban legend proves to me it doesn't work.

[b54red]

I have had some LB this year despite trying to keep Daconil on the plants. When you get 5 weeks of rain nearly every day there just isn't much you can do to stop getting the infection. If you spray the plants with the diluted bleach spray frequently between rains then you can limit the damage and prevent the spread of the disease. I have noticed that once stem lesions show up the plant is nearly always doomed.

[stonysoilseeds]

what i dont understand is we had an extremely dry season in upstate ny we gad a good rain last saturdayand since that time my over 300 tomato plants have been doomed

[Save$]

Originally Posted by stonysoilseeds

what i dont understand is we had an extremely dry season in upstate ny we gad a good rain last saturdayand since that time my over 300 tomato plants have been doomed

300 plants with LB!
I hate getting hit with LB every year. My crop was just for our family, not for income. We babied them along. They got huge. Then Bam! In a week, all dead. I really want to hear from others who have experience growing LB resistant varieties. I'm ok with the bleach suggestion, but not with spraying known toxins on my food. I am moving to the position of growing a crop in a big cloche. I have a few plants growing in a solar space. The door is open to that area, but I have never had LB infect those plants. My initial plan for next year is to grow an early determinant grop in hopes of beating the late August LB outbreak. We can our crop so getting the bulk of it all the same time ins't so bad. The growing season here in Maine is so short, it is hard to tell a determinate plant from an indeterminate one.

[ContainerTed]

I'm told that "Garden Safe" is listed as organic. Walmart sells the concentrate for around $16. It has kept a lot of my plants from fungal death. It is also an insecticide and miticide.

http://www.gardensafe.com/Products-a...ncentrate.aspx