Tomatoes can be some of the easiest vegetables to grow, but only if you have a long, hot (but not too hot), dry (but not too dry) growing season.  We struggle with tomatoes in non-drought years because our seemingly endless rains breed fungi that take out our crops.  I've posted about preventing tomato blights in bits and pieces before, but I thought I'd pull all of our anti-blight measures together into one post to make it easier for you to follow along.

Plant your tomatoes in the sunniest spot.  This year, we made an extra bed running the length of the chicken pasture just for our tomatoes.  The fence line runs from east to west on the most northern side of the yard, so this location gets the least shade from the hillside and the plants are least likely to shade each other.  The only slight problem with this setup is that grasses on the pasture side of the fence poke through the chicken wire, but they don't seem to bother the tomatoes and I yank them out when I weed.

Space the tomatoes far apart.  The distance you choose to provide between your tomato plants will depend on your pruning method, but the goal is to make sure there's open air between them.  We prune to three main stalks and tie the plants to a stake, so we only need about three feet between plants.  If you've got space, more room is always better.

Stake your tomatoes.  You may be starting to notice that all of these techniques have a common theme --- keeping the leaves of the tomatoes dry.  It's a big no-no to let your tomatoes sprawl across the ground since they'll take much longer to dry off after a rain or even a heavy dew.  Cages are okay, but hinder air circulation.  We tie up our tomatoes once a week to keep them climbing their stake.

Prune relentlessly.  Blight spores splash up from the ground onto tomato leaves, where the fungi grow and reproduce, producing more spores than can spread through your whole patch.  As soon as the tomatoes are about eight inches tall, I cut off any leaves touching the ground, a process that I repeat weekly since the higher leaves will start to bend down as they grow older.  Meanwhile, I snip off any signs of incipient fungal damage --- early blight showed up at the beginning of July, but with constant leaf removal, seems to be in check.  Finally, I remove all suckers, leaving only three main stems.  When pruning, clean your clippers with an alcohol-soaked rag between each plant and after you cut any dicey-looking foliage.  It's okay to let healthy leaves and stems fall to the ground, but take diseased leaves as far away as possible or burn them.  If a plant seems to be nearly all diseased, rip the whole thing out ASAP rather than hoping you can baby it back to life.

Choose resistant varieties.  We've tried out dozens of tomato varieties, but now focus on ones that are a bit more resistant than normal to early blight, late blight, and septoria leaf spot (our three main problems.)  None of these tomatoes are entirely immune, though, so we can't ignore them and hope for the best.

Water from below and/or in the early morning.  If you have to get the leaves of your tomatoes wet, make sure you do it first thing in the morning on a sunny day so that the plants will dry off as soon as possible.  I've located our sprinklers so that they don't hit the main tomato area, but we haven't got our drip irrigation installed yet.  The plants seem to be doing fine without the extra water so far.

Race the blight.  Of our three main fungal diseases, late blight is the real doozy, and it tends to hit late in the season just as the name suggests.  For fresh eating, it would be great to have ripe tomatoes all summer, but if you put away a lot of sauces, it wouldn't hurt to try out some determinate tomatoes.  This year, over half of our total tomato planting is devoted to Martino's Roma, which will drown you in tomatoes for a month or two and then peter out.  Another facet of racing the blight is to make sure your plants are always growing as fast as possible by providing lots of manure and not starting the seedlings too early (allowing them to be stunted.)

And now, two blight prevention tactics that we've tried which have failed miserably:

• Stick your head in the sand and pretend nothing's happening.
• Plant patches of tomatoes here and there and hope the blight won't reach them all.

Despite lots of rain, we seem to be in great tomato shape this year.  We ate 2011's first tomato (a Stupice) on July 12 and have enjoyed a tomato every other day since.  The main crop is about to come in, at which point I'll be preserving as fast as possible and quickly forgetting that a sun-ripened tomato is a rare treat.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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