Tomato Late Blight

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

Late blight is perhaps the most common fungal disease of tomato. A humid environment and damp weather favor its development. In sunny weather and dry air, phytophthora is quite difficult to find on tomatoes. However, even if you still had to face a similar scourge, you can significantly reduce its harmfulness. The main thing in this case is to detect late blight on time

A few words about the disease

On the stems and leaves of tomato affected by late blight, numerous specks of arbitrary shape appear, painted in gray-brown shades and often equipped with light green edges. And on the undersides of the leaves, especially when wet weather is established, a white bloom appears - this is how the spores of the pathogen fungus look like.

On the infected fruits, hard, blurry specks of brown color are formed, and the tissues of the tomatoes turn brown and rot after some time.

The causative agent of late blight is the ubiquitous and incredibly tenacious late blight (more precisely, the pathogenic fungus Phytophthora infestans), the spores of which can be found on garden equipment, on the roof and walls of the greenhouse, on the remains of vegetation and seeds, as well as on the ground. Most of all late blight loves weakened vegetation, temperature drops, thickened plantings and too diligently calcified soils. And the rapid development of the disease is favored by large amounts of precipitation and rather high air humidity.

How to fight

From all the beds on which tomatoes are grown, it is necessary to remove the remnants of vegetation in a timely manner. Compliance with the rules of crop rotation can also, to a certain extent, prevent the development of late blight. Tomatoes should not be planted next to potatoes. You should not get carried away with liming the soil - everything is fine in moderation.

Seeds should be pre-treated before sowing. To do this, they need to be kept in a solution of potassium permanganate for about twenty minutes, which will be enough to take only 1 g per 100 ml of water. After that, the thoroughly washed seeds are thoroughly dried.

To increase the resistance of crops to adversity, it makes sense to increase the dosage of potash fertilizers. And some summer residents, in order to prevent late blight, increase the temperature in greenhouses to thirty degrees, while reducing the humidity of the air. In order to increase the temperature in the greenhouse, it is enough to close it tightly for an hour or two on a sunny day.

Affected tomato seedlings, starting from the phase of two or three leaves, are treated with an interval of 25 days with the drug "Agat-25K".

Periodically, it is useful to spray tomato bushes with garlic infusion with potassium permanganate (for ten liters of water, 1.5 g of potassium permanganate and one and a half glasses of well-chopped garlic are taken). Some gardeners every ten days spray the crops with an infusion of wood ash. To do this, half a bucket of ash filled to the brim with water is insisted for a couple of days, and then the volume is brought to thirty liters and about one hundred grams of laundry soap is added.

Experienced summer residents also spray tomatoes with a solution of boric acid (10 liters of water - a teaspoon), infusion of pine needles, diluted yeast (10 liters of water - 100 g). A good remedy is a solution consisting of ten liters of water, potassium chloride in an amount of 30 g and forty drops of iodine.

You can also spray tomatoes every couple of weeks with a Trichopolum tablet dissolved in a liter of water.

It helps well in the fight against late blight and the infusion of the tinder fungus, for the preparation of which 100 g of crushed raw materials, filled with water, are covered with a lid and insisted. Strained infusion of tomatoes is sprayed as abundantly as possible over the leaves. The most optimal time for such processing will be the end of June or the beginning of July.

Environmentally friendly biofungicides have an excellent effect - at the first signs of late blight, the plants are recommended to be watered with Fitosporin. The first spraying is usually carried out as soon as the first ovaries appear, and then the treatments are repeated every ten days. Before planting tomatoes in greenhouses with "Fitosporin", you can also water the soil. It is not forbidden to add this drug from time to time to the water intended for irrigation.

If the merciless late blight has hit the tomatoes hard enough, the fruits should be collected immediately and put to ripen outside the beds.