“Just the thought of tomato blight sends fear into the heart of every farmer.”

Those are the words of organic farmer Charlie Reid, who operates two small farms in southeastern New Hampshire. “We’ve been lucky this year … so far,” says Reid. “Lots of farmers have had to pull (dig up and destroy) their entire tomato crops. But with all this rain and so little sun my luck could change (for the worse) overnight.”

Blight is a highly contagious fungus that hits both tomatoes and potatoes. The Potato Famine in Ireland in the late 19^th century was caused by blight. And now blight is killing both tomato and potato crops in New England and in some mid-Atlantic states. It’s not yet an epidemic, but cause for concern for both farmers and consumers, as well as home garden growers who unwittingly used infected seedlings.

The Vermont Agency of Agriculture’s “Agriview” has this alert for farmers:

“It (blight) appears on potato or tomato leaves as pale green, water-soaked spots, often beginning at leaf tips or edges. The circular or irregular leaf lesions are often surrounded by a pale yellowish-green border that merges with healthy tissue. Lesions enlarge rapidly and turn dark brown to purplish-black. During periods of high humidity and leaf wetness, a cottony, white mold growth is usually visible on lower leaf surfaces at the edges of lesions.”

There are two culprits in this year’s late blight: too much rain and consumer nurseries selling starter plants, which unwittingly spread the ailment.

Tomatoes Need Sun To Shake Blight

Rainfall has varied across the country at seemingly excessive rates: for example, too little in Texas and too much in the Northeast. While early blight in lesser amounts  is normal each year, this season’s heavy rains have soaked many farms and there hasn’t been enough sun to dry the fields.

Add wind to the rain and the situation worsens: Late blight spores are carried by wind from one plant to another. And while one plant might be infected and the one next to it untouched, eventually the entire crop in a field or backyard garden will be affected and die.

Although nothing can save your tomatoes once they become blight-infected there are a wide variety of preemptive organic and natural ways to prepare your crop. Go to Garden Web to start your search.

Organic farmers and organic home gardeners can also find natural and organic compounds at most feed and hardware stores.  Conventional farmers try to prevent blight by spraying with herbicides, fungicides and pesticides but even they don’t guaranteed success.

A second blight culprit this summer was the mass marketing of tomato plants sold at big-box stores like Wal-Mart, Lowe’s and Home Depot. An unknown number of plants were distributed by these stores via Bonnie Plants, a wholesale gardening company in Alabama that buys many of its plants from growers in other parts of the country.

Bonnie Plants has recalled seedlings that remained on store shelves but it was too late for others that had been bought and planted earlier.

Bonnie’s General Manager Dennis Thomas told the New York Times that only five of the recalled plants had blight. “This pathogen did not come from our plants,” he said. “This is something that has been around forever.”

Bonnie explains on its website that this year’s blight was worse than in previous years because of cool, wet conditions and refers home growers to the Texas A & M horticulture website, Aggie Horticulture, and its section on tomato problems. The notes on late blight help gardeners identify diseased plants; other tomato diseases are covered in the tomato guide at well.

An article in Growing Produce by a Cornell professor of plant website about this issue reports its discovery in commercial fields in Long Island in June, followed by reports on plants in retail stores.
The article notes that the problem could spread, depending on the weather: “All tomato and potato crops are at high risk of developing late blight this season, especially if the rainy weather continues. All growers should assume their crops eventually will be affected and thus should be on a weekly schedule to both thoroughly inspect their potato and tomato plantings…,” writes Margaret Tuttle McGrath.

Home Growers Should Dispose of Affected Plants

“We are urging home gardeners, especially those who may have recently planted tomato seedlings from a big box store, to check for this disease,” said Jim Dwyer, University of Maine Potato Specialist. “Because the tomato fruits will be ruined by this fungus and the threat of late blight spreading to potatoes, home gardeners that find late blight on their plants should pull, bag and throw out these plants. They should not put them on the compost pile.”

According to Jon Turmel, Vermont State Plant Regulator, “The stores across the state have been more than helpful at removing plants from their shelves.”

This summer in New Hampshire field tomatoes are selling for around $2.45 a pound but continued rain there and in Maine and Vermont hold the key to late blight and New England’s tomato crop. In the Hudson Valley agricultural region of New York late blight has been described as “explosive” and “never seen … on such a widespread basis.”

Late blight has not been common in New England but when it does occur it is very destructive. In Colchester, Vt., Laurie Mazza is still selling her greenhouse tomatoes for $2.99 a pound. “We’re a week or so away from our field tomatoes and while they look good now, especially the cherry tomatoes, something could happen.”

(Photos of healthy tomatoes and plants by Green Right Now.com; late blight tomato, photo credit: Texas A&M University)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

It’s already mid-March and that means the snows will melt and if the ground’s not too saturated farmers will soon be planting seeds for the food that will feed us this year.

Since time immemorial farmer’s markets have been with us: farmers harvest, bakers bake, dairy farmers milk their cows and they all meet at a central location where there’s lots of foot traffic … and they sell. The common theme: the food is fresh.

In addition to the standard organic fruits, vegetables and eggs, farmer’s markets offer items you wouldn’t usually consider: hand-made brooms, herbs, bath and body care products, lobster rolls, wine, organic teas and “traditional handcrafted leather goods and repair”, rabbits, natural and dyed yarn and spinning supplies, photographs of local scenes, elk and moose meat, organic spice blends and increasingly, fresh fish.

1. It’s locally grown

Most but not all Farmer’s Markets in the US require vendors to have grown, produced or crafted what they sell at the market. Most vendors are small, one- or two-person operations and they grow only what they can manage. They grow what’s in season and it’s local. Ask the farmer if they grew what they’re selling, ask if it’s organic. Don’t buy until you’re satisfied with their answers.

2. You know the farmer personally

You know where the farm family lives; you’ve seen their farm, your children go to school with their children, you see each other at church or at Little League games or at a movie. You know the farmer and you trust him. He’s a neighbor.

3. It’s where the chefs and restaurateurs shop for fresh produce and baked goods

Patrick Soucy, chef at a Portsmouth, N.H. restaurant that specializes in New American cuisine, buys at the local farmer’s markets because of the “better health, better quality” of the food.

“And the produce defines ‘tree-ripened’. It’s fresh. ”

Raj, chef at an Indian restaurant in southern Maine, buys there “because it’s local, within a 20-mile radius. It didn’t come here from California. Also, I support the local community.”

4. Prices are often cheaper than supermarkets

… but not always. Organically-grown and the small-operation produce is very labor-intensive. Individually planted by hand, individually nurtured during the growing process and then individually harvested by hand obviously takes a tremendous amount of time. But the local farmer doesn’t have the tremendous labor, mortgage, transportation and other expenses of a supermarket, so cost comparisons show that all-in-all the farmer’s market sells food for less than a supermarket.

5. There’s less of a carbon footprint: field to farm

What about the bananas at a supermarket in America that come from El Salvador, the berries from Chile, and the kiwis from Australia … how can they possibly be their freshest when they were harvested so early in their growth process and they grew older on their journey? Local produce usually travels less than 10 miles from field to market. Take a bite from a store-bought peach and then take a bite from a locally-grown peach. As chef Patrick Soucy says, “I needed five napkins to wipe my mouth after biting the locally-grown peach”.

This week, for the first time in the United States, an auction was held allowing power plants to bid against each other for the right to spew carbon dioxide into the air.

The goal, of course, is to reduce atmospheric carbon by finding the best way of putting a price tag on it for polluters. Ten Eastern states — Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont — have formed the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (or RGGI, pronounced “Reggie”) to coordinate their efforts by placing mandatory overall caps on emissions levels, then auctioning off allowances for CO2 emissions that can be traded between companies. As a result, companies will have a financial incentive to clean up their own act as quickly as possible.

Other regions of the country, from the state of Florida to a Western Climate Initiative, are either studying or actively planning similar cap-and-trade programs; this one is the result of five years of research and planning and is partly inspired by earlier efforts to tackle acid rain. According to Thursday’s press release, “Under RGGI, the ten participating states will stabilize power sector carbon emissions at their capped level, and then reduce the cap by 10 percent at a rate of 2.5 percent each year between 2015 and 2018.”

A ten percent reduction over ten years, of course, is a far cry from what most activists would like to see. But it’s a more substantial measure than any being taken on a nation-wide level, and the states promise to invest the funds raised in “energy efficiency programs, renewable energy stimulus efforts and other programs to benefit consumers. As a result, RGGI will deliver economic and environmental benefits and improve energy security through reduced use of fossil fuels.”

Six of the participating states offered allowances yesterday, selling credits for over 12 million tons of carbon emissions. Other states will sell their credits in future auctions, the next of which takes place in December.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media