Wondering whom to blame for the scarcity of organic tomatoes in the stores? It’s a late-season blight caused by a fungus like the one responsible for the Irish potato famine. But in the New York Times’ weekend opinion section, Dan Barber goes further: The blight was kicked off by the resurgence of home gardening:
“According to plant pathologists, this killer round of blight began with a widespread infiltration of the disease in tomato starter plants. Large retailers like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart bought starter plants from industrial breeding operations in the South and distributed them throughout the Northeast. (Fungal spores, which can travel up to 40 miles, may also have been dispersed in transit.) Once those infected starter plants arrived at the stores, they were purchased and planted, transferring their pathogens like tiny Trojan horses into backyard and community gardens. Perhaps this is why the Northeast was hit so viciously: instead of being spread through large farms, the blight sneaked through lots of little gardens, enabling it to escape the attention of the people who track plant diseases.”
Whoa! It’s your fault, backyard gardeners! Barber goes on to suggest that gardens should be sourced locally. Buy local seeds or starter plants from nearby growers. “A tomato plant that travels 2,000 miles is no different from a tomato that has traveled 2,000 miles to your plate,” he writes.
Though Barber perhaps comes down a bit heavy on home gardeners, his point is valid: Once you start growing, you’re part of the country’s agricultural network. What you do can affect other people, in ways good and bad.
Image source: Flickr member visualdensity under Creative Commons
That’s right, if they won’t stop buying from those places, scare them out of it.
proper pruning of tomatoes as they grow can forestall blights by keeping the plants off the ground. (blights are spread via water/soil contact)
Fine Gardening’s website has an excellent tutoial right now about proper pruning–it goes intot he hows and whys without being too dry. Check it out.
Don’t buy–grow your own. Tomatoes sprout very easily and if you check with local gagrden clubs or your local county ag commissioner, they can tell you the varieties that are the most successful. IE.: here on the foggy central calif coast, I can’t grow the large-fruited tomatoes, but can get great results with cherries or fog-tolerant varieties such as Stupice.
I just came up with a brilliant idea.
I’m a Chowhound. I’ll eat whatever I want, without regard of its source! Food is to be enjoyed. You guys want to turn it into a source of stress.
So, BTAT, vegetables harvested by slave laborers? No problem with that?
There’s no part of life that’s immune from ethical considerations.
Part of what is nice about planting your own tomatoes is how many plants will be successful in giving fruit. It’s a give and take. Also, home grown tomatoes don’t look like the clones found in grocery stores.
It also bears mentioning that cool, damp conditions causes late blight to travel further, and increases possibility of infestation. No mention of that in the article? I live in an area that is experiencing blight for the first time, and we’ve had a fairly cool, wet summer. Areas of my state that often has late blight show up about now started seeing it a month ago. They are several degrees cooler than normal, with an excess of rain. Many summer annuals aren’t even producing due to the cool weather. It’s not just home gardeners, or sources of tomato plants. And to place all blame at those two sources is simply incorrect, and somewhat irresponsible.
Tomato late blight this year was not as simple as having purchased your plants from a big-box store. As OrganicGal noted, it had more to do with the prolonged cool and very wet spring that we went through in the northeast. We bought our plants from a local nursery. On a Sunday afternoon my wife and I admired our beautiful tomato plants. On monday the bottom half of those plants were covered with black, wilted leaves. All we could do at that point was bag them up, send them to the dump, and notify our neighbor who has a truck garden/farmstand so they could spray appropriately. Had we had potatoes they would have likewise infected. Next year we plant in another place and, if damp weather persists, spray with non-toxic spray.