How to Treat Late Blight on Tomatoes

Dave Epstein: Hi I'm Dave Epstein, this is Growing Wisdom and I know many of you grow tomatoes and tomatoes have a lot of different diseases. Today we’re at Johnny’s Selected Seeds and we’re going to talk with Susie Anderson about late blight and that’s a disease that a lot of you might have heard about and we’re going to talk about how you can protect your tomatoes against it and if you get it, what do you do? Susie Anderson: It can be devastating to a homeowner if they get late blight in their tomatoes and don’t manage it properly. Dave Epstein: So, what do you do? Susie Anderson: If you have late blight, the first thing a homeowner can do is trim these off and gently place them into a bag right at the sight so that you're not carrying them around your garden and infecting other plants and placing them into the trash. You don’t want to put these in your compost pile because of the spores. You don’t want that to blow around on the wind. There are products out there, conventional products that can treat this and actually control it very well. The main ingredient on one of them is chlorpalanile, it’s a great product for conventional management of late blight. Organically, copper fungicides, definitely check—listing on what copper fungicide is approved and there are two products with two different species of beneficial bacterium, they're Serenade and Sonata. Most organic options are preventative. That means that they actually put down a layer on the leaf surface that prevents the spore from actually spoilating into the leaf tissue. Most of your conventional options are systemic fungicides, they’ll kill the mycelium that are growing in the tissue. That’s the big difference between these two options and why it’s very important when there’s a late blight called for to get preventative down on your leaf tissue so that spores won't actually get into that leaf tissue. Dave Epstein: That is such a good point because I—we often say, if you're going to manage your gardens organically, you’ve got to stay on top of it. You almost want to start doing these are—preventative measures from the get go. Once you guys get this, your choices really are, your plants can end up going or you can treat them synthetically. Susie Anderson: Yes. Dave Epstein: I know for other diseases, there's multiple sort of varieties of the disease. Is it the same for late blight or is there only one late blight? Susie Anderson: It’s a great question. It is, late blight has several different strains and depending on what strain is prevalent in your area, we’ll dictate how you manage this disease. Dave Epstein: Susie, thank you very much. A lot of information there about late blight, one of the many diseases that can affect tomatoes but knowledge is power and we hope that this has helped you here at Growing Wisdom.