Blighted Tomatoes
May 12, 2020
Blighted Tomatoes
Today Louis, Thea, and I spent hours clearing the blight from our tomato bushes in the faint hope that we can eradicate the fungus or at least keep it away from the healthy tomatoes until they are harvested.
Blight starts harmlessly enough – it looks like this:
Blight on the edge of a Tomato Leaf looks like squiggly bug lines 
Blight on a wild beet (rabbit food) looks like dust from chalk
Then it causes the leaves to curl up and die and produces brownish spots on the skin of the tomato fruit. If you open the tomato fruit at the early stage, they appear to not be damaged inside. However, shortly the tomato blight spreads to cover the fruit in a thick brown layer and will start to look shriveled; in reality, they are rotting from the outside in. Gross. Yes. Totally.
You can prevent it with fungicides. (we are well past that) You can destroy the plants and NOT use that area for planting tomatoes for the next two seasons – sometimes more!
We chose the in-between. We hope this works because there are so many big beautiful fruits not yet affected and looking gorgeous! We cut back all of the blighted parts of the plants (sourced the blight infection from a load of mulch) and burned them (okay, dumped them in the fire pit waaaay away from the plants).
Now we will keep a lookout for anything slightly infected and remove it from the plant. Hopefully, as blight is a fungus, this will keep the spores from spreading to the healthy plants and parts of plants. (An entire section of tomato bushes were blight-free.)
After pruning, we were left with these:
We’d like to see these guys grow big and red and juicy!
If you wonder what’s “Eating” your tomatoes and it looks like squiggly bug trails but no bug bodies, dying leaves, and browning yucky-looking fruit – it’s likely tomato blight.
Hope this helps!
Type at you next time!
~Nancy Tart
