On Thu, 1 Sep 2016 18:41:14 Stephen wrote:

Has anyone else been caught by blight this year? I'm in Staffordshire.
I had some tomato plants outside and one day they were green with
small fruit on and the next day they were like brown skeletons. I
presume that is blight? I could not find any good descriptions or
photos of blight on the internet to confirm this.

A week or so later my potatoes started to look a bit sorry for
themselves; they had gone from lots of tall green foliage to green
foliage lying down that looked more bare, and then the stems changed
from green to brown. I tried to harvest the potatoes before it spread
into the tubers but they had not been growing for long, so I only got
small new potato-sized potatoes. I noticed the original tubers that I
planted were brown and rotten and just a squishy mess. Is that blight?
I'll look into growing the tomatoes in a greenhouse next year and a
more blight resistant variety of potatoes.

Haven't been caught by blight on potatoes and tomatoes because I haven't
grown any for many years now as I was getting it every year. So I
decided to leave it for a couple of years and then never went back.

However, what I have noticed this year is some sort of fungal disease on
the leaves of things like sycamore (which I'd never seen before) and oak
(which I have) inter alia. Also, despite spraying my vines with Bordeaux
mixture against downy mildew I haven't bothered for a year or two with
adding dithane to the spray against powdery mildew and so that has
spoiled the grapes on a number of my vines this year.

David
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David Rance writing from Caversham, Reading, UK