Late Blight Update, 7/20

As posted yesterday, Late Blight has been confirmed in Maine and Massachusetts. This is a disease that threatens both home and commercial growers, and our local food supply — please monitor your tomato and potato plants, and report any sign of Late Blight to the Cooperative Extension. In New Hampshire, contact the UNH Cooperative Extension. The UNH Cooperative Extension is also offering free lab diagnosis of suspected Late Blight samples.

The latest update from Eric Sideman of MOFGA:

The latest update on late blight is not good news.  It has been found by scouts on a few more farms in the Waldoboro region. These have not been confirmed yet in the lab, but the field observations were on tomatoes and potatoes on commercial farms. This means that growers in that area should be very vigilant scouting…

To read more, including his recommendations for organic growers >

And from the Pest Management Office, Maine Cooperative Extension, which is also accepting samples of suspected Late Blight:

Late Blight:  Grower and Farm Stand Alert

Potato late blight, the disease that caused the significant crop losses for tomatoes and potatoes in Maine last year has just been confirmed at a sight in Waldoboro, and several other suspected sites are now being investigated. Typical symptoms will be a water-soaked grease spot on foliage with a fine white mycelium on the underside of the leaflet. A stalk infection will usually look dark brown, almost black.

 

The spores released by infected plants have the ability to travel 40 plus miles under the right conditions and infect potato and tomato plants. We are encouraging all commercial growers and home gardeners to be carefully inspecting their plants for disease. If late blight is found we are asking that the diseased plants be destroyed. They can be buried or simply bagged so that the spores can not escape and that the plant will die.  Late blight is an obligate parasite and needs living tissue in order to survive. Applications of protective fungicides should be applied to tomato and potato crops if they have not been receiving regular applications up to this point.

 

The Pest Management Office in Orono will look at any samples that you may suspect have been infected. When sending samples, they should be placed in a plastic bag with a piece of moist paper towel to keep the sample fresh.

 

For pictures of this disease visit the following websites:

www.longislandhort.cornell.edu/vegpath/photos/lateblight_tomato.htm

www.longislandhort.cornell.edu/vegpath/photos/lateblight_potato.htm

 

The Pest Management Office has copies of a home gardener alert, a late blight ID sheet for roadside stand producers and a poster for late blight identification that you can use to make your help and your customers more aware of this potentially devastating disease.

 

Late Blight Hotline: For the most recent information, call the IPM Hotline at 207-760-9IPM (207-760-9476).

 

Pest Management Office

491 College Avenue

Orono, ME  04473

1-800-287-0279

PMO @ umext.maine.edu

This entry was posted on July 20, 2010 at 9:46 pm and is filed under author: Debra, grow your own. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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