Advice on cleaning up after tomato blight

[Ellesbells]

This year my tomatoes suffered a really bad bout of tomato blight. Really. Really. Bad.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to deal with it as I was in hospital with an unforseen emergency, so I came home to a complete and utter disaster zone. Normally I would cut back lower leaves & thin everything out, but wasn't able to this year and with a combination of the weather, lack of attention and everything else going on it was a bit of a perfect storm. I've never had blight as such in the garden and now I am worried this will hang about and continue next year.

I've cleared all the plant material (all of it, every single plant was destroyed) and collected the fruit into the green bin. What do I do with the soil from the containers? Can I spread it somewhere without contamination? I'll clean all the pots with *****, but I am very concerned that any tomatoes next year will not have a hope of success!

Any help, advice or reassurance would be wonderful!

Thank you

[ameno]

You don't need to do anything. Indeed, there was never any need to destroy the infected plants in the first place. They can be safely composted. And the soil can be safely used for anything you like (although it's best not to use it for tomatoes again, not because of risk of infection but just because it won't have enough nutrient left).

Blight cannot survive for more than a few weeks without a living host. Any spores in the soil or anywhere else, along with any spores and fungus on the plant material, will be long dead by next spring.
If you are wondering how, then, blight survives from year to year, the answer is potatoes. It survives on infected potato tubers, which go through the winter as a living tuber (and thus a living host for the blight), then grows into a potato plant the next year, gets infected with blight almost immediately, then spreads it to everything else.