Earth To Eats

Late Blight has Hit: Potatoes and Tomatoes in Jeopardy

16th August, 2009 - Posted by Scott - No Comments

After reading a few articles on Late Blight coming to the Northeast I found my potatoe crop ravaged by it.  My daughter and I salvages the potatoes from the plants that seemed unaffected, but tonight I went out to start cleaning the spuds we pulled only to find that the fungus was on several of the tubers and when I began removing them from the lot, they burst open into a mass of oozing gelatin, dripping onto the others in the pile.  Trying to be gentle and sift slowly through caused others that were infected to rupture.   As a result, our entire potato harvest is a loss this year.  I can’t trust any of the remaining ones not be diseased.

Here are further articles discussing the infection affecting so many this year:

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2009/07/05/Late-blight-hits-early-in-Northeast/UPI-89851246769782/

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/07/31/disease_that_spawned_irelands_potato_famine_hits_new_england/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/nyregion/18tomatoes.html