Tomato Blight

I spoke too soon when I told anonymous that we didn't have tomato blight. When we saw Duncan yesterday, he said he thought the tomatoes had got blight – sure enough when we got to the plot today, every tomato plant was dark, with blotches on the leaves and the stems, and the fruit had light brown bruise-type marks too. When I got into the tomato bed itself, I saw that many of the fruit had fallen and were greenish-brown. Now I knew they were probably planted too close together and I knew that we hadn't been taking out side-shoots as often as we should have done because we've been busy - so guilt hit me like a large shovel landing in my midriff.

So most of today was spent cutting through the stems of tomato plants and folding deep brown wilted leaves into bin bags. Then I had to gather up all the fallen fruit and bag them too, and finally dig up the stumps. I felt like a failure, a tomato murderer, an allotment monster.

Then I saw Sue – with a punnet of the most glorious tomatoes of all shapes and sizes and colours and she told me that her allotment had got tomato blight too. And that was terrible news and I was very sorry for her, but there was a tiny ray of happiness deep in my heart, because if as good a tomato gardener as Sue could get blight, then perhaps it wasn’t entirely my fault and I wasn’t a tomato murderer or allotment monster after all!

Labels: allotment-tomato-blight, allotment-tomatoes