On Sun, 02 Jan 2011 11:05:32 -0500, The Cook wrote:

I just got my catalogue from Johnny's and they are touting a tomato with
high resistance to late blight and intermediate resistance to early
blight. After last year this seems like something I must try even tho
they seem to be expensive, 20 seeds for $4.95 + shipping. But if they do
work it will be worth it.

I tried Legends last year, none of them survived even though it was a
great year for tomatoes, I suspect that they would have been a mediocre
tomato anyway since they were bred for blight resistance not flavor.

I used copper fungicide on all of my plants last year. Copper fungicides
are supposed to be safe, the label says that it can be used up to the day
of harvest and that it can be used for organic gardening. I only used it
when the plants were small.

In 2009 I lost everything due to late blight (I'm in New England where
there was a plague of late blight that year). Last year I did the
following to prevent a repeat,

1) I didn't buy any plants from big box stores (they were implicated in
the 2009 disaster).

2) I started a lot of my plants from seed. Most of the varieties that I
planted from seed didn't make it, the one notable success were the
Cosmonaut Volkovs.

3) To replace my losses I bought plants from a local nursery. I treated
all of them with the copper fungicide when I planted them and then
repeated the application every few weeks for the first month. The nursery
plants did incredibly well, I had more tomatoes than any year since the
Reagan administration. The big winner were the Sun Gold Cherry tomatoes,
it's by far the best tasting tomato that I've ever tried, it's almost
candy. The plants were prolific, producing hundreds of tomatoes a piece.
They starting yielding tomatoes early and continued to produce until late
in the fall. I ate them off of the vine and I also made a ton of spaghetti
sauce with them.