Tomato blight outdoors

[Plot70]

If I collect seed I get it from supermarket fruit.
I have had a couple of ripe baby plums and they are OK.
A couple of plants grew viggerously and crushed everything and have large beef sized fruits on them with no sign of ripening.
I have chucked an over ripe banana in to try and get them to ripen a bit faster but it is not doing anything.
Green tomato chutney time in a month or so by the looks of it.

[ameno]

If I collect seed I get it from supermarket fruit.
I have had a couple of ripe baby plums and they are OK.
A couple of plants grew viggerously and crushed everything and have large beef sized fruits on them with no sign of ripening.
I have chucked an over ripe banana in to try and get them to ripen a bit faster but it is not doing anything.
Green tomato chutney time in a month or so by the looks of it.

Interestingly, in the latest Which Gardening magazine, they did a test on ways of ripening green tomatoes, and found storing them with a banana actually doesn't help. Quite the opposite, in fact - they ripen at the same rate as the others, but they shrivel faster when with the banana.
They tried keeping them in a draw with a banana, in a draw with no banana, on a cool windowsill, and somewhere warm (to simulate an airing cupboard), and basically, they found that as long as you keep them at at least room temperature then the speed of ripening is basically the same (give or take a day or two) no matter which method you use. However keeping them somewhere warm and keeping them with a banana both hasten shriveling, so you're really best off just putting them in a draw or kitchen cupboard until they are ripe.

I'm getting confused by whether it is late blight or leaf spot or canker etc - black spots and stems is what's showing on mine, all outdoors as I don't have an indoor set-up.

I've been spraying baking soda and neem oil etc, but it's been rain on and off, cold then hot, that I'm pretty much throwing my hands in the air in despair.

You say get rid of all the plants - does that mean the fruit is inedible? Can you get sick from eating them? Most of my fruit are green and a couple have black colouring entering it - but I thought it was because it was the black variety! I had so many plants from so many sources I lost track of what was what.

I put the pruned leaves on the manure/compost pile, but then read up and plonked the last ones in the burner bin and worried about the ones deep in the compost - but I'm reassured by the living tissue requirement some of you have mentioned. Thanks.

Blight manifests as dark drown or black blotches on the stems and leaves which spread very rapidly, often doubling withing a couple days in warm, damp conditions. Infected tissue soon goes soft and collapses.
If your's is spreading very slowly, it's not blight (unless you are growing a resistant variety, then it still could be).
If its neat, small patches rather than large, irregular blotches then it probably isn't blight, either.

You can still eat any uninfected tomatoes. As far as I know, even the infected ones aren't poisonous or anything, they just taste vile. You'll know if you've eaten a blighted fruit, believe me.
Fruits from a blighted plant almost certainly won't keep, though. Even if they are sound now, they will develop blight in storage within a week or so. So any ripe ones need eating up straight away, and any green ones need cooking into green tomato chutney or similar.
You need to pay careful attention to the fruits before you use them, though, as they only turn brown in the late stages of infection, but the flavour is tainted as soon as the infection begins, so you need to spot the early signs of infected fruit. They develop an uneven skin surface with small dimples, and a sort of swirly pattern on the skin, often with a very slight yellow tint.

[MarkPelican]

If I collect seed I get it from supermarket fruit.
I have had a couple of ripe baby plums and they are OK.
A couple of plants grew viggerously and crushed everything and have large beef sized fruits on them with no sign of ripening.
I have chucked an over ripe banana in to try and get them to ripen a bit faster but it is not doing anything.
Green tomato chutney time in a month or so by the looks of it.

Give them time, don't panic. I get beefsteak ripening very late. A couple of years ago (when the weather was OK) I got ripe beefsteak tomatoes in Mid November in the greenhouse.

At the moment I'm waiting for this one to ripen, but as you can see the plants aren't very well.

[ameno]

Not just "not very well"; they clearly have blight. Are you sure you shouldn't pick the tomato and try to ripen it indoors, so it's less likely to succumb to blight?

[Vince G]

Thank you all for the benefit of your experience. The 24 plants affected were plum tomatoes
12 Roma VF and 12 San Mazarno VF . I had a similar problem 3 years ago , it is perhps
the result of growing too large a crop .

I had terrible blight when I grew these varieties in my polytunnel. It might be because they're Italian and in hot dry Italy, blight is virtually non existent so the varieties have no resistance.

If you want to grow plum tomatoes, try Giulietta - they have decent resistance. They do succumb eventually but not usually until early October in my experience. I also grew Cocktail Crush this year which have not caught the blight at all, and the flavour is excellent. Other flavourfull varieties with excellent resistance that I grow regularly are Fantasio and Apero (an oval shaped cherry).

[KJessi]

Not just "not very well"; they clearly have blight. Are you sure you shouldn't pick the tomato and try to ripen it indoors, so it's less likely to succumb to blight?

is it because of the black stem on his tomato plant that you're saying that? - i have them too and did a brutal prune and am now just hoping for a week to get the green tomatoes to a bigger size so i can at least make some burger relish.

[ameno]

is it because of the black stem on his tomato plant that you're saying that? - i have them too and did a brutal prune and am now just hoping for a week to get the green tomatoes to a bigger size so i can at least make some burger relish.

Yes, the black stems are unmistakably blight.

[Plot70]

Give them time, don't panic. I get beefsteak ripening very late. A couple of years ago (when the weather was OK) I got ripe beefsteak tomatoes in Mid November in the greenhouse.

At the moment I'm waiting for this one to ripen, but as you can see the plants aren't very well.

There are some fruits that look a bit like that on some of my plants from supermarket seed.
The banana can stay on the compost to rot down.
I put peppers and even a spare butternut in my little greenhouse but several of the tomato plants have become aggressive and crushed everything.
I have had some gherkins but everything else is gone.
I have not seen any blight yet but have been sticking my head in to get at the last of the gherkins.
Photos will have to be taken tomorrow so that you can see what I mean.

[Penellype]

As soon as I see the tell-tale black colouring from blight on the stems I harvest all the fruit from that plant and any nearby. In my experience you can save about half of the crop if you act quickly. You then need to check the fruit at least once a day, preferably more, and remove any fruit that show any hint of brown.

In my experience tomato fruit go through 4 stages of colouration. To start with when small they are a dull blueish-green. These probably won't ripen off the plant, tending to shrivel up, but I do keep the larger ones just in case. As they mature they become a much brighter green and shiny - these usually ripen indoors if not diseased or bruised. When they are nearly ripe they develop a yellowish tinge and will almost always ripen if not diseased. Finally they start to turn red (or orange, yellow, black).

I put mine out in a single layer in seed trays in my (coolish) utility room, grading them as best I can by ripeness. I move the ripest ones to the sitting room or kitchen where it is warmer to finish off, and I will move fruit between trays as things develop. I have had tomatoes (usually Sungold) ripening in January from outdoor grown plants using this method.

[MarkPelican]

Yes, the black stems are unmistakably blight.

Actually I don't think it is blight, most of my plants have got bacterial canker and wilt this year and when I cut off the leaves they get grey mould and that what you can see. None of the plants or fruit are going the slimy effect or black impact of blight.

That said, the bacterial canker has affected some of the fruits (particularly Summer Cider) and the result is a "black thread" through the fruit which doesn't seem to affect the taste but doesn't look good so they don't get eaten.

The greenhouse and all my tomato stuff will need a good clean over the winter and I won't be using any of the plants as compost.

[Plot70]

Photos as promised yesterday.
Several plants with either big round fruits or big ribbed fruit have forced several baby plum plants out of the door during hot weather.
I tried to tie them back but all they did was to produce branches from parts of the stems that were hard to get to and got even bigger hitting the roof.
There is a lot of green fruit and no sign of blight yet.
I can water without getting any on the leaves because they are planted direct in the beds allowing me to poke the watering can under the frame of the greenhouse. .

[ameno]

Actually I don't think it is blight, most of my plants have got bacterial canker and wilt this year and when I cut off the leaves they get grey mould and that what you can see. None of the plants or fruit are going the slimy effect or black impact of blight.

That said, the bacterial canker has affected some of the fruits (particularly Summer Cider) and the result is a "black thread" through the fruit which doesn't seem to affect the taste but doesn't look good so they don't get eaten.

The greenhouse and all my tomato stuff will need a good clean over the winter and I won't be using any of the plants as compost.

I've never seen bacterial canker before, but having looked up a load of pictures of it, I still think those dark patches on the stems look like blight. Bacterial canker looks more brown, and causes sunken areas on the stems (the eponymous cankers).
Resistant varieties are not immune, after all. But because they are resistant, the blight spreads very slowly, so it's not unusual to have one or two patches of it which doesn't spread any further to fruits or leaves.

[Jungle Jane]

Plot 70 how can you get in the greenhouse try & pinch the tops on the plants & pinch out the sideshoots to speed ripening?
Out of 49 plants,I had to cut down two that had blight yesterday,they were touching each other,leaning on each other after the storms,I saved the ripening fruit but got rid of the green tomatoes I don’t need them. I’ve picked green blight risk fruit before & they brown like they’ve got a bit of the infection.

[MarkPelican]

I've never seen bacterial canker before, but having looked up a load of pictures of it, I still think those dark patches on the stems look like blight. Bacterial canker looks more brown, and causes sunken areas on the stems (the eponymous cankers).
Resistant varieties are not immune, after all. But because they are resistant, the blight spreads very slowly, so it's not unusual to have one or two patches of it which doesn't spread any further to fruits or leaves.

The reason I don't think its blight is because the fruit are not affected in the way that I would expect them to be with blight. Rather than the black and slimy appearance of blight on under-ripe fruit, some of the ripe fruit on some of the infected plants have a small pale "halo" patch. But its not all of the fruit on all of the plants and there's no sign of anything on underripe fruits. If anything's happening to underripe fruit, some are falling off which I guess is caused by lack of water because the stems are infected with some virus and the capillaries are blocked.

I've grown 20 or so different varieties and they're all affected. If it was blight, I think I would have lost more plants completely.

The infection has always come in from damaged leaves/stems where I've cut them down and there's definitely grey mould forming on most of the cuts.

I know its all down to my poor hygiene so next year "I'll be good, promise" . (I wish I was an expert)

BTW that large fruit is ripening

[Plot70]

Plot 70 how can you get in the greenhouse try & pinch the tops on the plants & pinch out the sideshoots to speed ripening?
Out of 49 plants,I had to cut down two that had blight yesterday,they were touching each other,leaning on each other after the storms,I saved the ripening fruit but got rid of the green tomatoes I don’t need them. I’ve picked green blight risk fruit before & they brown like they’ve got a bit of the infection.

I have to crawl in under the baby plums that have been pushed into the doorway and stand up in a little space in front of the plants at the back.
I have got several gherkins forming in spite of the vines looking a bit yellow.
They are in a mixture of Derbyshire clay and horse manure.