CT Food

If you can get local tomatoes now, eat them, enjoy them, and savor the memory – because that very well could be it for Connecticut tomatoes this summer – especially organic ones.

Late blight is what we’re talking about here. I’m sure you’ve been hearing about it for the last few weeks. It’s the disease that caused the Irish potato famine in the 19th century. It’s a water mold type fungus that also affects tomatoes and is running roughshod through northeastern tomato crops right now. Here in Connecticut the prognosis is shaky at best.

Dr. Jude Boucher is the extension educator for agricultural and commercial vegetable crops for the University of Connecticut Cooperative Extension office in Tolland. As of Wednesday, he said he’s found late blight in all but New London and Middlesex counties (to be honest – he hasn’t tested Middlesex yet). He’s found it on “upwards of 20 to 25 farms.” That’s a lot. And no names – he’s not allowed to say where, other than that some farms have lost everything.

And if you ask him whether the organic tomato crop is in danger of being wiped out this year – he said: “There’s a very good possibility unfortunately. I don’t think were at that point yet. But each farm that gets it, it puts a lot more spores in the area, so the proximity of late blight sources increase.”

Translated – that means the more farms that get it, the greater the potential to spread. Late blight spreads through the air. It needs 65 -70 degree temperatures, rain and high humidity to survive and infect a plant and that’s basically what we had all of May, June and half of July. Perfect storm — to use a cliché, and pardon the pun.

And it’s tough to get rid of. You have to either spray – it does respond to fungicides, which are best sprayed as a preventive, not after plants are already well underway. Of course organic operations can’t do that, so they have to do the other method — digging up the plants and sealing them up or otherwise destroying them to prevent spores from spreading. And that’s really difficult with tomatoes because many growers use plastic sheeting and stakes, and all that has to be dismantled as well.

“This disease is devastating,” Boucher said. “It’s capable of killing a large field of tomatoes in just a few days.”

At Stone Gardens in Shelton, which is not organic, but does practice integrated pest management, Stacia and Fred Monahan already had one scare – so far so good, though,

“We’re spraying potatoes and tomatoes more than usual than we would with a regular i.p.m. program,” Stacia said. “We don’t want to take a chance of it getting into our fields.

At Star Light Gardens in Durham, David Zemelsky grows his heirlooms organically under plastic. “I just scouted like crazy,” he said last weekend. “I’m satisfied I don’t have it.”

Good luck with that. Boucher said plastic should help, but he’s seen late blight get into greenhouses and high tunnels.

Patrick Horan at Waldingfield Farm in Washington Depot – which is certified organic with tomatoes as its mainstay – has already had to contend with a devastating hailstorm in the crazy weather patterns of this spring. So Horan is making changes in how his tomatoes are picked.

“We’ll probably not hire help we previously hired because most likely they have been working at other farms and the potential risk is not worth it,” he said. Workers can carry spores on clothing, equipment vehicles, whatever. “It’s just the interns and ourselves,” Horan said.

“Any way that you can contain spores coming from another place, that’s a good idea,” Boucher said. “There will be some landings but you don’t have to help them.”

The other thing that’s making this particular late blight bout so devastating is how it started – likely from plants supplied by a grower to big box stores. Boucher checked three box stores in Manchester and found late blight in all of them. That meant it was actually going into home gardens all over the state, which in all likelihood infected the commercial growers at a very early point in the growing season, giving the disease lots of time to snowball through all that wet weather. Usually if late blight shows up, it’s late in the season and doesn’t do that much damage.

So where does that leave things. Well – as we noted – there’s a very high potential for Connecticut tomatoes to be decimated. Prices are likely to spike, big time. Normally, Bouhcer said, wholesale boxes start at about $20. “I’m suggesting they ask two-to-three times that,” he said. “I think supply is going to get short very quickly.”

Enjoy ‘em while you’ve got ‘em.