![]() Tomatoes are the most popular edible plant grown in backyard gardens. This can also help to prevent fungal disease, further supporting proper airflow and allowing wet foliage to dry more readily.Prevent and treat tomato diseases to ensure your harvest of America’s favorite homegrown vegetable. Some gardeners like to remove the lower leaves from their tomato plants, effectively preventing any foliage from touching the surface of the soil. Adequate airflow is also important, to reduce humidity and give your plants a chance to dry off after periods of rain.īe sure to provide proper spacing between plants, as recommended for the cultivars you have selected. Proper watering is a precautionary measure that can be taken to prevent all sorts of fungal diseases. ![]() Removing weeds and volunteer seedlings is particularly important, since the pathogen can overwinter on tomato seeds as well as potato tubers, and produce infected seedlings the next season. Avoid overhead sprinkler irrigation, and only water at the base of plants.Check starts before you plant them, to make sure they are free of disease symptoms.Removing any volunteer tomato and potato plants, and any wild nightshades, from the garden.There are several steps you can take to prevent late blight from taking hold in your garden. Purge hairy nightshade weeds from your garden and surrounding areas, and keep a close eye on your petunias for signs of infection if they’re growing nearby.īe sure to rotate nightshades with other crops from season to season when growing them in your garden, and check for spread to other vulnerable plants if they are growing in close proximity. Infected weeds may contribute to further spread. The organism may attack other solanaceous plants as well, including hairy nightshade ( Solanum physalifolium), and petunias grown in greenhouses. But if the weather will remain wet for a while, it is better to destroy the plants immediately than to wait for a dry day.Īs described above, potatoes are also highly vulnerable to late blight. Ideally, you should destroy the plants on a dry, sunny day, so the spores will die quickly. Dig them up in their entirety, till them under, or cut them off at the soil line and immediately bag them, so the spores will not spread. If you find evidence of late blight that is already severe, remove and destroy the diseased plants immediately. But remember that this disease spreads rapidly under suitable conditions, and there is no cure. I’ll cover how to determine whether this is a viable option a little later in the article. The first inkling that your tomato plants are infected will be evidenced by small, water-soaked lesions on the leaves. This disease tends to occur later in the season than the similarly named early blight, typically after plants have bloomed, and when weather conditions are favorable. How to Identify Late Blight on Tomato Plants Hot, dry conditions help to halt disease spread. Though infection may occur more slowly, if nights are moderately warm, and conditions are extremely wet during the day but hot, the disease can still develop in temperatures as high as 95☏. The spores can spread long distances on the wind, particularly in cloudy conditions. Infection spreads rapidly, and plants can succumb quickly, in a matter of days. If spores are present in these conditions, they can infect a plant in about 10 hours. The organism requires humidity above 90 percent to cause infection, and moderate temperatures in the range of 60 to 68☏. Conditions That Favor Late BlightĪgain, there is a reason that this type of pathogen is called a water mold. In cool, wet weather, this disease can cause entire fields of tomatoes to turn brown and wilt as though they have been hit by frost. The spores can spread rapidly to nearby gardens and even into commercial fields. It’s not just your crop that’s at stake, after all. ![]() The destructive ability of this pathogen makes it important for gardeners to be able to identify it and take swift action. In fact, the scientific name Phytophthora translates to “plant destroyer.” This type of water mold readily infects and may quickly kill plants. And each individual sporangium can start a new infection on another plant. To give you an idea of the scale that we’re talking about, a single lesion can produce as many as 100,000 to 300,000 sporangia per day. The receptacles that hold the spores (sporangia) can survive for up to an hour in dry, sunny conditions – and much longer in wet ones. These spores can travel for miles in the air, and under ideal conditions, they can infect plants on a broad scale. Wet, humid conditions caused by rainfall, dew, fog, or sprinkler irrigation are conducive to the spread of this pathogen. Once the plants have become infected, the organism can produce millions of spores in the right conditions. This disease can easily be introduced into gardens via infected tomato or potato plants.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |