When Bad Things Happen to Good Tomatoes
May is when our region’s vegetable growers set their early tomatoes outdoors, often under row cover for protection. Thinking of the optimism most growers automatically exude this time of year, I was jolted back to a presentation I attended last December along with a hundred vegetable growers from the greater Northeast.
It was like a good whodunit.
Corpses were in evidence throughout the East─infected tomatoes (and potatoes) strewn among trash heaps and compost piles and ploughed under. The plant disease Phytophthora infestans, the one active in the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, more commonly called late blight, had been on the loose in early summer 2009. At the New England Vegetable & Fruit Conference, University of Maine pest management (and tomato forensics) specialist James Dill told how they tracked the rapidly spreading disease back to several box stores that were selling infected tomato seedlings that were imported from a greenhouse in Alabama. Click here for the presentation.
It’s impossible to resist the overused phrase the perfect storm to describe the wet and cold conditions of June and July 2009, conditions that allowed late blight to move far and fast along the eastern seaboard. This disease is airborne and can move miles in the wind. It was a southern strain of late blight, which is why it kept right on doing business when the dry warmer temperatures of August set in. Other strains of late blight slow down or stop when the temperatures reach the 80s.
For some vegetable growers, it was the worst of times. They lost their entire tomato crop. Oddly enough, I’ve heard other growers, who managed their way through the disease by some combination of close monitoring, added spraying, and luck, say it was actually a very good tomato year.
Go figure. Go plant tomatoes (actually, wait a couple of weeks).
More about the author
Michael Rozyne has been a marketer of small farm products for three decades. He worked on conventional and organic farms in Maine, and was Purchaser and Marketer for a regional food distributor in New England. He was cofounder of the fair trade coffee company, Equal Exchange. He started Red Tomato in 1996 and is now RT’s Co-Director. He lives with his partner Kimberly and two daughters in Middleborough, Massachusetts.
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