![]() Therefore, continuous fungicide coverage is necessary to protect plants. For home gardeners, the only available fungicides that are effective against late blight are protectant materials, which means that they must be on the foliage before spores land on leaves. If the growing season is wet, and late blight is present, fungicides will be necessary to protect your plants from infection. Make sure any potatoes put into compost piles are completely decomposed, and destroy any potato plants that come up from tubers that were left last season. Destroy any rejected tubers that you don’t plant. Avoid introducing late blight on potatoes by planting healthy certified seed potatoes. Late blight can only survive on living tissue, so potato tubers or tomatoes are the only source of early season inoculum. The most effective management strategy for late blight is to avoid sources of early season inoculum (spores). It is very important that everyone who grows potatoes or tomatoes is able to identify late blight and know how to control it, to avoid being a source of spores that infect neighboring gardens and commercial fields. Spores can also be washed through the soil, which may rot before harvest, or in storage. Spores produced on infected potatoes and tomatoes can travel through the air, and if the weather is sufficiently wet, can cause new infections. Early in the season, the disease can be introduced into a field or garden on infected seed potatoes, from volunteer plants growing from diseased potatoes that were not harvested last season, from infected potatoes in cull piles (rejected potatoes), compost piles or infected tomato transplants brought into the area. ![]() This organism is well known for its ability to produce millions of spores from infected plants under the wet weather conditions that favor the disease. Late blight is caused by an oomycete pathogen that survives from one season to the next in infected potato tubers. Late blight is a plant disease that mainly attacks potatoes and tomatoes, although it can sometimes be found on other crops, weeds and ornamentals in the same botanical family (solanaceae). ![]()
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