Taking Care of Blight

I chose the perfect day to prune my tomato plants. It's been 70 degrees and cloudy. I got lucky.

Next year I really need to remember to plant my crops further apart. I definitely didn't give any of them enough room to spread out and really grow. I have a squash plant wrapping itself around a tomato plant, and tomato plants intertwining so much I can't tell which plant is which. Not to mention, you can see the path of the blight.

Before

After reading up about blight, I've found that it takes touching leaves and lots of water to spread the spores quickly, and you could definitely tell by looking at my plants, the path the blight traveled.

I lost most of my "Early Girl" plant because it's in the back, I couldn't see it very well, and by the time I noticed the blight for what it was, it had spread through most of the plant. Luckily, the branches that held most of the ripening fruit weren't affected, but pretty much all of the other branches were sacrificed. Our "Early Girl" is now a Naked Girl. I think we should still be able to get the remaining fruit from the plant, but I'm not sure how much more it will produce. Hopefully I was able to save it and it will continue to produce a bunch of tomatoes.

Because the "Early Girl" is next to the "Black From Tula's" and the "Orange Chef's" Choice, those

After

two plants lost the second-most of all my plants. Also, the "Sweeties" needed some minor pruning at the base of the plant, and when I did that I found a bunch of fruit I didn't know was even there. As you can see from the photos, I took off a lot of leaves, but I didn't lose much fruit. There is still some low-hanging fruit on the "Sweeties" so I left them there. Also, this plant only had minor blight, and I mulched heavily in hopes to prevent future blight outbreaks. If that fruit wasn't there, I would have cut all of that off at the base and probably still will once those tomatoes are ready to pick.

I went ahead and pruned my other tomato plants in the other garden bed to the south. There were minor signs of blight, but nothing like the north bed, but I still wanted to prune to prevent any blight from happening in the future. I went up about a foot of the plant, trying to think about how water splashes when I water. I also mulched that bed heavily, making sure to spread the straw away from the base of the plant a bit to prevent rot or pest from showing up.

The future plan is to get some soaker hoses set up and get them connected to our rain barrels. That's going to take some work, though, so it probably won't happen tomorrow. Soon, though.