How far does blight travel?

[binley100]

yup .....first time for a few years that I've managed outdoor toms at the lottie. Still got them going at home and they are still ripening , stunned.com

[Nik]

My garden toms get blighted every year in mid september. My allotment is about a quarter of a mile from my house and there's no blight there. Ditto for pea moth.

[Thelma Sanders]

It's the other way around here, plot gets it when the garden, literally round the block, doesn't...weird innit

[snohare]

the selfsown toms in the CG

CG ? Carpeted Greenhouse ?

Talking of blight on tomatoes, I have a memory from a few years back that might interest you.
I found an American website talking about growing tomatoes in some county that had previously been famed for the number and productivity of its small scale tomato growing farms and gardens. Market gardens I suppose, though clearly there were a lot of home growers doing canning, etc. Unfortunately I cannot remember which state this was, the location meant nothing at all to me at the time.
Anyway, suddenly blight started hitting them like nothing ever before. The local tomato produce industry was devastated, within a couple of years most folk just gave up.
However, the person who created the website was still growing tomatoes, and very successfully to judge by the photographs. Local growers had copied her technique - or vice versa - and were able to get crops on a regular basis again. How ? They had gone nudist...
The theory propounded was that it was usually rain that washed spores onto the plants, and thus started the infection cycle. If there was not splashback from rain hitting the soil at the base of the plants, and if the leaves did not stay wet long enough for infection to begin, then the chances of infection were dramatically reduced, to the point where growing tomatoes was once again a viable option.
So what they did was remove much of the foliage from the tomato plants - presumably stems just were not so vulnerable, although to be honest I cannot remember - ensure that the soil around the base was prevented from splashing up, and where they were growing them outside against walls etc they created little corrugated perspex roofs above them (somewhat reminiscent I thought of the shelters that the Victorians used to use in their walled gardens to protect espaliers against snow damage). I think they were careful about spacing away from the wall, and between the plants, too.
In effect, by reducing the humidity and splashback onto leaves, and speeding up the drying times when plants did get wet through better air circulation, they were able to get bumper crops again.
Of course they had a hotter climate, probably more inclined to have occasional thunderstorms (just the very thing to circulate blight) rather than muggy and consistently damp like we might get...but it has always stuck in my mind, because quite evidently these nudist tomatoes didn't need all that foliage that most tomatoes have.

[Sylvan]

That sounds interesting snohare. Worth a try.
The first bed of tomatoes that succumbed in our garden were the terribly crowded ones that had been allowed to go feral.

[Thelma Sanders]

where I used to live the old boy 3 doors down was Italian, and he had a cheap plastic roof over the whole 16ft x 25ft garden (only a roof, sides were open) and all he ever grew was toms and basil............and he never got blight. So covering them does work
I must say that his plants were widely spaced apart, and this makes a difference, I think, as well.