ORISKANY, N.Y. (WKTV) – There’s a disease that’s hitting tomato plants across the northeast and it may have found its way to your own garden here in Central New York.
Officials out in Oriskany from the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Oneida County say the big box retail stores in our area : Walmart, K-Mart, Home Depot and Lowes all had the same supplier of tomato plants, a company from the south. That company had plants tainted with the disease called “late blight,” a fast spreading disease that will kill your plant and any plants near it.
Will someone please tell me why ALL the major Big Box stores get their tomato plants from the SAME SUPPLIER for the entire Northeast?! Stupid! Sheesh, now even our plant suppliers are consolidated! Ugh!!
My tomatoes had vicious blight last year– I am sure they had the blight before I bought them, because as soon as I got them into the ground, they turned brown and died. (I’d bought them from WalMart. I’ll never do that again. I think WalMart is getting too big for its britches, selling everything under the sun. Next thing you know, they’ll be doing piano lessons). So this year, I got the tomatoes from Lowes. I don’t know why I even buy the plants- tomatoes grow so easily from seed. I’d composted some tomatoes in my large compost pile a year or two ago, and added the compost to my garden. I guess the seeds didn’t compost, because that year I had dozens of little tomato plants growing in the garden beds everywhere. From now on, I’m just going to grow from seed.
If you have bought tomato plants from these stores, Miller says “really keep an eye on them and look for any kind of pale greening, wet soaked areas on the leaf tips and especially if they have started to turn brown and dispose of them as we have talked about.” Miller says the proper method is to put the diseased plant in a dark colored plastic bag, put that plastic bag in another dark plastic bag and leave that in the sun in order to kill the spores. Once that is done, you are ok to put that with your other yard waster to be taken away.
If you want more information, check out the Cornell Cooperative Extension site.
Tue, Jul 7, 2009
Gardening, summer