Hi Sacha,

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 10:05:18 +0100, Sacha
wrote:

in article , Peter Richards at
wrote on 10/10/03 2:39 am:

Hi,

Our new tomato plants are showing signs of dark brown and light purple
patches on the leaves, obviously blight. We prefer an organic solution
to the problem. Can someone recommend something please.

Peter, my husband used to grow tomatoes commercially for many, many years,
as did his father before him. He says he knows of no organic method (and
he's very expert on biological controls and uses them all the time in our
glasshouses)

Okay, thanks. We did try the "milk solution" for a few days, and it
did actually stop the spread of the blight. Plus I got my "LLM"
(liquid leaf mulch) onto the plants, in the hope of getting some good
natural 'food' into the plants. However, the original blight is still
there, some of it slightly less than before though. So those methods
did stop the spread, and reduce, to some degree, the original
fungus/bacteria, etc.

He says that he knows of no truly effective inorganic control,
either.
In his opinion, the only answer is to pull them out and burn them.

Yes, after at least trying to fix it, we are going to pull them out
and throw them in the rubbish bin (local council here won't let us
burn anything without a permit). We were hoping to find some remedy
and "fix" the blight completely, because the plants were a gift from
my parents, and it was a case of, ..if all else fails, then destroy
them.

Don't plant new plants in the same area.

I've been wondering it that is what caused it. When we got the plants,
I don't _think_ there was any blight (not that I checked all the
leaves though, hey, ... it was a present), and because the vegie
garden is not _quite_ ready yet (it's spring here), the plants went
into larger pots. I used soil for the pots, that came from an area
that had tomato plants last season, and some of those had the same
blight. That would seem to indicate the cause was a soil borne source,
but nothing conclusive, just my naive understanding of this.

Thanks,

Peter


Peter Richards

(but use hotmail to email)