Identifying and Treating Early Blight on Tomato Plants.mp4

Hi everybody, Jeff here, Executive Gardener. Thanks for joining me for this episode. So if you live in the South, Southeast, or any part of the United States that it's really hot, really humid, and really damp, Houston, Orlando, Mississippi, Alabama, part of the Carolinas, Louisiana, you have a big issue with early blight, okay? And it's different than late blight. This episode of Executive Gardener is going to be talking about early blight. So we're going to talk about what causes it, what it looks like, and then how to treat it, okay? So in Houston, Texas, where it is very rainy, very hot, and very humid, we have huge issues with early blight. So I took some leaves off my plant yesterday, I'm going to show you what it looks like, but it's a big problem. So let's talk about early blight, what it is. So it's a fungus, okay? It's a fungus, and fungus, of course, is made up of spores, okay? And it's a dirt or soil-borne fungus, okay? And it's passed on to your plants because in that wet, hot, humid environment in Houston where we had 60 inches of rain last year, rain comes down with such a force that it hits the soil, the soil splashes, and it gets on the bottom leaves of the plant or the stem, okay? And it creates this fungus called early blight, which will not kill the plant, typically early blight will not kill the plant, but it does cause an impact and it will affect your plant. It'll look very unsightly, it will kill some leaves and some limbs of the plant, and also potentially impact your harvest, okay? And that's called early blight. So I've got a few leaves here, I'm going to show you, I cut them off my plant yesterday, I'm keeping them in this cup, and I want to give you a close-up, instead of showing you a picture from the internet, show you what early blight looks like, and if you have this on your leaves, this is early blight. So I cut these off yesterday, and you'll see they appear as brown spots on your leaves, many times they're concentric, leathery, sunken rings on your leaves, and that's exactly what they look like. So the best thing you can do, and we'll talk about treatment of blight later, and you'll see that there, is remove the branches and leaves completely from your plant, do not compost them, get rid of them, throw them in the trash. And here's some other signs of blight, you'll see on this leaf, you know, some spots throughout, some brown, leathery spots throughout the leaf, yellowing, so eventually blight will start as a fungus, here's some more, okay? You see those brown spots on the leaves? Also you may get powdery mildew or leaf spot, all a fungus, mildew's not, but the leaf spot would be a fungus. So what you want to do is you want to get rid of these like I talk about. Cut the leaves off, remove them, throw them in the trash, do not compost them. Blight will transfer from plant to plant, leaf to leaf. So I've already removed mine off my plant to save you some time of watching me painfully cutting each stem and branch off the tomato plant. But this is what blight looks like, okay? And so again, it's mainly caused in hot, humid, wet environments, okay? So if you live in Arizona, you live in Vegas, you live in parts of the north, you typically, you may have early blight, but you may not. But if you live in Texas and Florida, anywhere in the southeast, you'll recognize this. So let me get the camera, let me give you a close-up of my tomato plant. I've removed most of the leaves. We'll talk about what you can do to prevent it and then how you can organically treat early blight. So before I do, I want to mention one thing. Early blight and late blight are two different things, okay? Early blight, your plant can't survive, you can remove the leaves, it may impact your harvest a little bit. Late blight, which is a completely different fungus, completely kills a plant. So if your plant has late blight, and I'll put a few pictures up here real quick. So if you have late blight, you want to remove your plant, put it in the trash, get rid of it all together, and make sure you never see it again, okay? Late blight typically does not occur in hot, humid, wet environments. It typically occurs in cool, cool, damp environments, okay? And late blight, the Latin name for late blight means total destroy, or total destroyer, okay? So that's bad news. Early blight you can deal with, remove it. So let me get behind the camera and show you how to deal with early blight. All right, so here we are back in my tomato garden, as you'll see I've planted a number of tomatoes, and we're going to talk about this plant here in particular. So I believe most of these, this one wasn't, but most of these plants have been planted from seed, and I've transplanted. So what you'll see here is, here's my side garden, you'll see I have to do a little bit more weeding, but let's not focus on that for now. But here's a baby tomato plant. So what I did was, on this plant here, I basically removed most of the bottom stems. I cut them off, and that's the blight that you saw, the early blight that was on this. So what you want to do is remove most of the bottom stems, and you'll see here, here's one at the bottom too. I'm just going to remove this as well, because this is too close to the soil. And when it rains, it really comes down hard here, and the soil splashes on these leaves and then creates blight. Now there's no blight on this one, as you can see, and I apologize, we're dealing with some shadows, but either way, this is a plant. So let's talk about how you can prevent blight. So number one, which is obvious but not always easy, which is you don't live in the southern humid climates. That gets tons of rain, tons of heat, tons of humidity. That would be Texas, southeastern United States, and Florida. So if you don't want to deal with blight as much, live in southern California, where it never rains, or up to now it never rains, or Nevada, or Arizona, or Minnesota, or New York, where you don't get 60 inches of rain, and you don't have the hot, humid times, okay? They still deal with early blight, but certainly not as much. Number two is choose the right variety of tomato plant. So there are different varieties that have good resistance to disease, like powdery mildew and early blight. Choose those plants if you don't want to deal with early blight. Number three, prevent overwintering. So when you redo your garden year over year, and you add compost to it, make sure you remove all plants, all weeds, that the fungus could still be in and reside over the winter. So remove all plants, prevent overwintering. Number four, space and rotate your planting. So where you planted last year, move the tomato plant to another part of the garden the following year, and you don't have to worry about that, okay? Number five, do not water from above. So do not spray your plants or use a water bottle from above, because all you're doing is you're watering your leaves, which do not need the water, and that will also foster late blight or even early blight, okay? So with your water, use a drip system like I am doing, so a drip hose as such, and allow it to drip on the base of the plant in the soil. That way you prevent the splattering of the soil. Number six, check your plants and remove the diseased leaves. So as you saw already, all you have to do is get a pair of scissors, chop all the infected leaves off. You have to inspect your plant, folks, you can't just let them grow by yourself. This creates issues with me, I travel three or four days at one time, and before I know in three or four days, if it rains, I could have early blight. Remove the leaves completely that have early blight, the ones that I showed you before, get them off the plant, and you're good. So the other thing you want to do is you can put hay or mulch around the base of your plant, okay? What that'll do is when it rains really hard, it'll prevent the soil from splattering into the leaves of your plant, which carries the spores, which will cause late blight. Now I'm not going to do that, but a lot of people do use hay or some type of mulch to prevent the splatter from the soil. And then I would say another one would be to remove, like I just did, remove any bottom branches that you have on the tomato plant, they're really not necessary, and that is a preventive measure from keeping the soil from splashing those leaves when you get hard rain. And then also make sure you plant your plants in an area that gets lots of breeze, okay? So if you're in a greenhouse, use fans, okay? If you're in a, this part of my yard gets a lot of breeze, as you can see, the plants constantly have air flowing inside and out, so they remain in pretty good shape. So again, to prevent early blight, make sure you have a lot of space and breeze that goes through your plants. The last thing you want to do, and this is really not to prevent early blight, but to treat early blight. So what you're going to do is you're going to get a simple spray bottle, okay, like such that I bought at Home Depot, and you're going to mix up a solution, a baking soda spray, okay? So for the baking soda spray, this is what you need, okay? You'll need three tablespoons, you need a gallon of water, okay? You need three tablespoons of baking soda, you need one tablespoon of vegetable oil, you need a few good drops of organic dish soap, okay? Mix it all up with one gallon of water, pump it up, and what this is going to do is it's going to create an organic solution that prevents mold spores from being able, excuse me, not mold, fungus spores from being able to live on the leaves or the stems of your plant. So for blight, early blight, and powdery mildew, for it to live on the leaf of your plant, you really need a pH of 7.0. By spraying a baking soda solution on the plant, what you do is you change the pH of the leaves to 8.0, and when you change it from 4.0 to 8.0, it's enough to prevent and kill the blight spores that have a potential of living on the leaves of the tomato plant, okay? Now what you want to do is when you spray, you want to spray this solution either early in the morning or late at night. It's preferably early in the morning. If you spray it on during the heat of the day in 90 or 100 degree temperature, it could negatively impact your plant, so definitely do it early in the morning. Another way of doing it, there's another solution, organic solution that I have that helps prevent early blight called Seranade, S-E-R-A-N-A-D-E, like Seranade, someone, like a song. So in doing that, it also helps you because it's organic, number one, and number two, it creates the same type of solution that helps prevent the fungus spores from growing on the leaves of your plant. So I've already sprayed this up. All you simply do is you want to spray your leaves very good. You want to get the stem too, okay? And the bottom, the top, everything. So make sure that your plant as such, as you see with my plant, is dripping, okay? You want it dripping with this baking soda solution. The reason that you put the dish soap and the vegetable oil is to help the baking soda stick to the leaf of the plant, okay? This is relatively early morning, so I'm going to spray it right now and I'll come back and close the episode. Hey folks, thanks for joining me on this episode about how to prevent early blight. I hope you've learned from it, you can prevent it, and the organic way to treat early blight. If you treat it, you can have a beautiful, great harvest of tomatoes, but you've got to stay up with it, you've got to know what to look for, you've got to take preventive measures, you've got to inspect your plants, and you've got to treat it, okay? If it's late blight, completely different. Remove the plant, get rid of it. Early blight can be dealt with. Hey, one thing before I go, because I want to give you a bonus episode. I want to kind of show you around what I'm growing around the garden, it's a fun thing before I close. But before I do, a lot of you have asked about how I'm doing on my lifestyle change, which means diet. I don't like the word diet. But losing weight, the answer is great. I've lost 14 pounds in six weeks, I feel great. Blood pressure, blood sugar, all of that is in great shape. So thanks for checking up with me. I still have a few more to go, but I'm feeling really good, and I encourage all of you, and remind all of you, we only have one body, okay? And we've got to take care of it. Sometimes we all, including me, have a tendency to eat too much, or drink too much, or be too sedentary, and in the long run it won't hurt you, excuse me, in the short run it won't hurt you, in the long run it will. So I encourage all of you to take care of your health, take care of your body. Let me get behind the camera and give you a quick tour, show you a few of the cool things that I'm growing in my garden, how they're doing. Alright, to start with my outside patio table, it's kind of a mess, and it's not just my fault, it's my wife's fault. So I was doing microgreens, these are Dunn Peas, as you see, they've grown so much, and I couldn't keep up with the amount of peas that were grown to eat them, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them. On the other side I grew kale, and the kale microgreens grew so much that I couldn't keep up and eat with them because of my travel. Some cucumbers going there, but my wife is planting a bunch of flowers in the front yard, and they've been sitting there for a week or two, so she will get to it, I won't nag her, because I'll get in trouble, haha. Anyway, so let's take a look at this. These are my aqua camels. So I talked about this in a previous episode, I love these aqua camels, I do not get paid from them, I don't endorse them, I just think they work really well. So as I talked to you about before, they hold two or three gallons of water, it's a three gallon soil pot, and they water from the bottom. So what you'll see here is I have a Jimmy Nardello there, and I've got two Mohawk Specialty peppers. So these plants only get a foot or two, and they become very prolific. So as you'll see, look how beautiful those things are, man. These pots are using very well. And if you're looking on the outside, the white is not mildew, it's diatomaceous earth that I put out there to prevent some of the flying insects from bothering and getting into my soil. But look at these things, man, the leaves are very waxy looking, the peppers have just started growing. But absolutely beautiful. And this plant, same thing, you'll see we've got some peppers growing, it looks really good. And the Jimmy Nardello is a little bit behind, but anyway, definitely growing well. As you see, I've kind of pulled everything out of my green stalk garden. I do have some broccoli, some baby broccoli that's growing on top, which I'll pick and remove those. But what I'm going to do with this green stalk garden this year, as you can see, is I'm going to grow cherry tomatoes. Okay, and I've got, I'm going to put a few dwarf pepper plants there, but cherry tomatoes throughout this thing. And what they're going to do is the tomatoes, they're all different varieties, black cherry tomatoes, yellow, white, and red. And they're just going to kind of droop down here and hang over. And it's going to be interesting, it'll be an interesting contest between me and the birds to see who gets more, but hopefully each of us will have an equal share. As we go to my back garden, I wanted to show some of the few things that I'm going to be growing. As you know, I took all my grapevines out, they just were too out of control. So what you'll see here is that I do have edamame. So I'm going to start edamame plants this year, as you'll see, those are all edamame, they get to be bushes. And I do have some bush beans and some pole beans that are growing very nicely here, okay. Now what I wanted to talk about, just on this real quick, is that these bean plants also get blight, but this is not fungus blight, it's bacterial blight, okay. So it looks very similar, similar to fungal blight, but same thing with these leaves, just cut them off. As you'll see, I'm going to start repurposing these grapevine trellis, and the beans will be growing on them. So I've got some broccoli, that's actually doing fairly well, but it's a little bit warm and it's starting to wilt a little bit. Look at that kale, man, beautiful kale. Need to harvest that soon before it gets too warm. Potatoes, okay, I did potatoes in a container. These things have just gone nuts, doing great. Potatoes in a window box, okay, done great. Cabbage, doing wonderful, okay, probably in two or three weeks I'll be able to harvest that cabbage before it gets too warm. I do have some peas that are growing on here next to my fake snake, and some more potatoes. But in general, I like to experiment with different things, try different things out that work and don't work, but as you'll see, everything's doing fairly well here. I still have to contend with the same thing, which is lots of rain, but I've never grown edamame before. If you've grown edamame, leave me a tip, hopefully it'll grow very well. And I've never been really that successful in growing beans here, so I seem to be off to a good start, as long as the weather cooperates and we don't get too much rain. So that's it, I wanted to show you a few other things from my garden, what's going on, and I'll bring you back when I harvest some of this stuff a little bit later. So until next time, stay healthy, Jeff from the Executive Garden Channel, take care, bye.