[music]
Man: The bad thing about late blight is that if you have it in your tomatoes or potatoes,
it could actually take a full potato field, let's say a 10-acre potato field down, if
the conditions are right, overcast, 70ish degrees, foggy, wet.
It can take that field down in a matter of days.
There are several things you can do for management.
The first thing is, certainly for the home garden and making sure that you plant, as
I say, potatoes, make sure that you've got good, certified seed that should be pretty
much late blight free.
With tomatoes, when you go in and purchase, if you're purchasing tomato plants from your
local store, make sure you look that all over for the symptoms that we just talked about
and make sure you buy good, healthy plants.
The second thing is, of course, you can use fungicides to actually control to try to manage
the disease.
You want to talk to your local cooperative extension about what the best thing is to
do for you.
But, a lot of times with either tomatoes or potatoes, what you end up having to do is
destroy the organism as much as you can see it.
There's a couple ways to do this.
If you've got a really bad infestation, you may need to actually take that whole plant
out.
When you take the plant out, the idea is you take the whole plant out, put it into a plastic
bag, a large plastic bag, then you can just tie that up and put it in your trash and it
can be taken off to the landfill.
Or you can take this material, dip a hole and bury it.
Make sure there are several inches of soil over the top of it.
Because remember that it has to have living tissue to survive on.
Late blight has to have this living tissue.
So once it's buried in the ground, this stuff all decays, the tomato plants and that type
of thing.
Now, another way to do this, if you want to try to save your crop...One of the things
that we do recommend people try to do at least for a few days, this isn't the day you want
to do it on.
But what you want to do is when it's very hot out, maybe midday some day, nice, bright,
sunny day, you come up to your plants and what we want you to do is take a plastic bag,
put underneath and you just take and snip off the diseased parts.
You want to be careful.
The reason why you want to clip it right into the bag is you want to touch the foliage as
little as possible.
You just kind of look around, you want to look around the foliage, look where you've
got some other problems.
Again, put the bag underneath it and you clip the foliage off and try to make sure you continue
to get everything that has symptoms on it.
Continue to look around the plant.
The problem becomes is on plants like this, even though I'm trying to be very careful
here, looking over the whole plant, trying to find the lesions.
If you're doing it on a day like this when it's wet, all I've got to do is brush against
one of these lesions, I get spores on my pants and as I move down the tomato row, I'm spreading
them down myself.
That's why you want to do this on a hot, dry day, there's less chance of that disease spreading.
The spore probably only lives, if you've got a nice, bright, sunny day, probably only can
live about an hour.
Once you've got this, you bag this up, you take this out of the field.
Again, you can just tie this up, throw it in the trash, and it goes off to the landfill.
Or if you want, again, you can dig a whole, dump the bag of tissue in it and bury it so
there's several inches of soil on top of this just like you would with potato plants or
anything else that may be, or the whole plant that may be infected.
Another thing about a late blight is it does have a tendency to move on these wet days.
I just mentioned earlier that probably one, two, three miles, there's some information
that says late blight spores can travel 40 miles or more.
So even though you may be very diligent about trying to remove all your lesions from your
plants, it may very well still continue to come in.
You have to be very diligent, out there every day, looking and trying to remove these spores
so that the disease does not continue.
[music]