Is It Blight?

[daviddevantnhisspiritwife]

Thanks guys. I appreciate the opinions. I think the alerts and the continued muggy and thoroughly miserable weather had me on hyper alert :P.

It's been a little brighter on and off today, I shall stand down and just keep an eye.

[BertieFox]

I have now finished harvesting the crop which was surprisingly much better than I expected, mostly small potatoes but quite a few fairly large ones too. We will have to eat lots of potatoes over the next month as I doubt they will store for long, but we shall see.
I gave all the tomato plants a drenching in Bordeaux mixture though it has rained heavily several times again with thunderstorms so it may have washed off... a few tomato plants have tiny brown blotches on the leaves, but I'm hoping this won't spread as most haven't flowered yet or begun to set fruit. Does anyone know how often you have to reapply Bordeaux mixture to give them protection if it is raining heavily and frequently?
At least with early blight it has given me warning to plant far more inside the polytunnel so we should at least get a reasonable tomato crop from those.

[Stan79]

Rather than start a new thread I was wondering if someone could look at the picture below and tell me whether this is blight or just the potato plants dying back?

Many thanks.

[daviddevantnhisspiritwife]

Rather than start a new thread I was wondering if someone could look at the picture below and tell me whether this is blight or just the potato plants dying back?

Many thanks.

I think it looks like early blight. Which is what I also think mine is turning out to be.

I might be wrong (I have used google as a reference).

I did apply Epsom salts on the chance that it was magnesium deficiency and I have also fed them in case they were lacking. The weather has been pretty condusive to it here with numerous alerts over the last month.

I have taken the precaution of removing the worst affected foliage which has gotten like yours - luckily there are some reasonable spuds under the ground, but sadly not a great volume of them.

[Potstubsdustbins]

Don't think that's blight Stan.

Blight is brown blotches with a white mould on the edge of the spots when you turn the leaf over. Looks more like its done its job to me.

Potty

[daviddevantnhisspiritwife]

Compare and contrast:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=e...mg._234BqJubJA

[daviddevantnhisspiritwife]

Hopefully I am wrong then! I must admit, the spuds under the ground are ok.

[Stan79]

Thanks. I did Google it and wasn't convinced it was as it doesn't look like the majority of the pictures. Yes it looks like one of them but not the majority!!!

[Potstubsdustbins]

I think your wrong for one simple reason its now 16 days since your first post on the subject.

Your plants would now be a browny/black mess.

Potty

[daviddevantnhisspiritwife]

I am pleased to hear that. Like I said, I wasn't sure and I could be wrong - and to be fair I quite often am. Though I hope to learn something.

Touble is the RHS have the 1st image in their rotation that has very similar foliage (halfway down page):
Potato and tomato blight / Royal Horticultural Society

Garden Organic's pictures are quite different:
http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/asse...Bridge-CSR.jpg

As long as I have potatoes I will be happy.

[Potstubsdustbins]

Blight is very quick acting usually destroying the plant within 5 to 10 days.

By this time if you have had rain the spores will have also got into the ground and affected the tubers.

Potty

[daviddevantnhisspiritwife]

The ones I had for tea were fine, they would have been better if I had cooked them though

[BertieFox]

I think it's always best to assume the worst with blight, especially if you have tomatoes nearby to which it will spread. Earlies should be ready to harvest by now anyway if they went in by a reasonably early date. Although I had a disappointing harvest due to our blight, we did still get a sackful of reasonable sized potatoes all of which were edible and unaffected, though they may not store. I removed every scrap of blighted foliage, sprayed the tomato plants with Bordeaux mixture, and since then have removed every bit of foliage on the tomatoes which shows the slightest sign of browning or spots. So far the tomatoes are looking perfectly healthy and with the recent hot weather have begun to take off well. With a week of 30C and sunshine forecast I should be lucky enough to get the tomatoes to fruiting size without any further problems.
It's interesting how neighbours 10 km away, with whom we shared our seed potatoes, have been completely blight free so far, so the blight either came in the heavy thundery rain we experienced, or maybe from the 'volunteers' which had come up from last year. Ironically, these were the last to succumb to blight and at one point we thought we might be able to leave them in, but not so.

[daviddevantnhisspiritwife]

My potatoes have 'perked up' somewhat. I did spray them with Epsom salts and gave them a bit of a feed. I also removed quite a bit of sorry looking vegetation. Definately not blight, but was a concern (esp. with the blight alerts - which continue to roll in, 2 more since my previous post) as I have outdoor toms nearby and 2 greenhouses with toms in very close proximity.

Fortunately next year I should be better prepared to get an earlier start.

Glad you managed to get something out of yours Bertie. Looks like the weather is on our side now for the near future at least.

[Penellype]

Very interesting thread. I'm new here and I thought my experience last year might be helpful. I grow potatoes in patio bags, and tomatoes in the soil, and last year all of the tomatoes got blight by early September and I hardly got any fruit off them at all. The potatoes were not far away and I was terrified I would lose those too. I'd already eaten the earlies (Maris Bard) but I had 2 bags of Desiree which were in the process of dying back after flowering. I left one of the bags outside, and lost most of the potatoes in it to blight. I pulled all of the haulms off the other bag and took it into the garage, and when I harvested those potatoes (gradually until mid-November) there was no sign of blight at all.

At my previous house, which had a much larger garden, I used to grow potatoes under black plastic sheeting, planting the tubers through slits in the plastic. I never had blight there, which may just have been luck, but I think if the leaves were affected the polythene might act as a natural shield to prevent the tubers from being infected. An added advantage of this method was that the potatoes tended to form under the sheeting rather than deep in the soil, making harvesting a lot easier.