A Blight Upon Your Plants!

The boys and I stood dejectedly in the garden. Before us lay the sixty-plus tomato plants that I had grown from seed and carefully nurtured as seedlings. They showed such promise in early June when we planted them out. Tall and green they stood, and their only enemies seemed to be the curious geese that nibbled their leaves.

Then came the blight - the all conquering blight. First the bottom few leaves turned spotted and yellow. These we pulled off, and covered the bare ground around the tomatoes with clean straw to prevent backsplash of the fungus from the dirt below. More and more leaves succumbed to this "spotted fever", and soon the small green tomatoes showed signs of scab. The plants no longer stood, but lay exhausted, their fruits attempting to ripen in the few hot days of August.

The newspaper headlines screamed of early blight disease that traveled from the south - Alabama to be exact - taking revenge on Northern New England tomatoes and potatoes. Fugicides flew off the store shelves. Garden bloggers gave advice on organic remedies sure to help. And still the plants died. No kitchen garden or farm was left untouched by this grim reaper that sent hundreds of thousands of plants to their funeral pyres. Disconsolate canners sigh and their canning kettles lie unused - jars and larders empty. "Oh, for the taste of one vine ripened tomato" is the cry heard from hundreds of lips - the sweet flavor but a distant memory as we force ourselves to by bland tomatoes in the produce section of the local grocery. In this war the South has truly won.