Blight again. Can I save the fruit?

[Marb67]

Well, yet again my Tom's have blight due to a poor Summer and hardly any sun. I really don't know why I bother as I cut all the leaves off when I saw it on the foliage and yet only a few days later and the fruits are getting affected. Can I save them?

[ameno]

Almost certainly not, no.

In future, I would recommend growing only blight resistant varieties outdoors. This has been a bad year for blight, and even my resistant varieties are relatively badly affected (compared to most years), but the infection is mostly limited to the leaves, and only around 10-15% of the fruit are becoming infected.
I recommend varieties in the Crimson Crush series. Crimson Crush itself is a large tomato. There is also Cocktail Crush (also know as Crimson Cocktail), which is small to medium, and Rose Crush, which is a pink-hued beefsteak. All taste pretty good. I think there is a plum variety in the series, too.

[Marb67]

Ok, thanks. It's just so depressing after getting such promising fruits yet again. Even blight resistant potatoes have had it. I'm going to cut all the leaves off my greenhouse Tom's to get the fruits to ripen quicker before anything gets them. A grower once swore by it for getting better fruit.

[Nicos]

Personally I’d remove all the healthy looking tomatoes, even if they are green, and either freeze them or chutney them.
I’ve never managed to rescue any by leaving them to turn red. Once they show brown blotches they taste dreadful

[Penellype]

I would pick them all too. Sometimes you can get a few to turn red without going brown, but it depends how far the disease has spread inside the plant. It is going to turn cold anyway after the weekend. Tomatoes will ripen off the plant as long as they have begun to turn a yellowish green rather than the blue-green of very young fruit. If you are worried about blight it may be best to pick anything that looks even vaguely ripe and ripen them indoors.

[Marb67]

Too late now as the rains have returned for days. Game over.

[Penellype]

My biggest tomato plant (Sungold) got blight yesterday so I picked the larger green fruit.



will probably lose about half of them if previous years are anything to go by, but it is worth trying.

[Penellype]

I thought it might be useful to keep this thread updated with what actually happens so that the question in the title of the thread can be answered.

The plant concerned was a large Sungold which had not had the sideshoots removed, so it was sprawling everywhere (photo taken on 1st September):



This was not intentional - I was trying to support it with stakes and a tomato cage, but the weight of the plant demolished it, probably in the wind. I was therefore not really surprised to see it get blight. About a week ago we had a hailstorm and the leaves and fruit were damaged and produced little brown marks on the leaves and stems and white circles on the fruit. I have seen this before with hail.

On Sunday morning I picked 25 fruit that were beginning to turn orange. None of these have developed blight (yet). On Sunday afternoon while weeding I noticed a brown mark on one of the stems at the bottom of the photo. I knew immediately that this was blight. Inspecting the leaves showed 2 sorts of brown marks - dry and crispy ones from the hail damage, and more "watery" looking greyish brown marks, which are blight. There were not many blighty leaves, but they seemed to be scattered throughout the plant. In total I found 5 brown marks on the various stems (none on the main stem) and 4 brown fruit. I cut the whole plant down and saved about 500 of the biggest fruit (in the picture in the previous post), putting the rest of the plant in the compost bin. Plants nearby (another Sungold in the next bed, Oh Happy Day and Crimson Crush in the same bed) do not yet appear to have blight.

By this morning, less than 48 hours after picking, 5 of the tomatoes on the tray have started to go brown and have been composted. I am checking them twice a day. I will update this thread as things progress.

[Nicos]

Thank Pen…interesting to see/ hear.

I used to cut my losses and just used them green rather than risk losing more waiting for them to ripen .

[Penellype]

Thank Pen…interesting to see/ hear.

I used to cut my losses and just used them green rather than risk losing more waiting for them to ripen .

I tried making green tomato chutney one year, but I really don't like it and ended up giving it all away, so there seems little point. If any of them ripen I will be able to do something useful with them and those that don't will go to make compost, which is fine.