Hi Steve. I live in South Tulsa and deal with a lot of Early Blight every year. I do the same as you, too, with the spraying, mulch, soaker hose, and trimming. I thought about the spores overwintering on my cages a few years ago, so I started soaking my cages with a strong bleach spray at the end of the season, and at the beginning of the next season. I still get a lot of Early Blight. You'd think the bleach would kill any spores on the cages. I've attributed mine to the birds in my neighborhood. One of my neighbors likes to "house" birds in her backyard. Those birds LOVE my garden. They love to land on my cages and poop all over my plants. Maybe their poop is carrying the spores from whatever they eat? It's the only constant I've had every year. I thought a few years ago it was my crazy infestation with spider mites that may be causing it. But I've done a good job of getting rid of most of them the past couple of years. And the Early Blight is still an issue. I can't get rid of the birds, so now it's a race to harvest as many fruit as I can before the plants die every year.

I may be totally off with my reasoning for the Early Blight. But I can't think of anything else.

Lee

Early Blight can overwinter on things like cages (and garden tools), and it is widely airborne---pretty much worldwide, so you'll never really be free of it. Well, in a really severe drought year when rainfall is very low and relative humidity seems to stay lower than average, I don't see it much.....provided I water with drip irrigation or soaker hoses that put the water on the ground and not up into the air and on the foliage.

It doesn't hurt to spray your cages but keep in mind that airborne fungal spores can reattach to them anytime, so you may find this to be of limited usefulness. You can use a bleach soak of your seeds before planting them if you raise your own tomato plants from seed, since it is known that EB can survive on plant parts, including but not limited to seeds.

Are y'all either burning all the infected plant debris or bagging it and sending it to a landfill? That is what is recommended because composting the infected plant material may allow some spores to survive. If the mulch that was on your soil beneath your tomato plants is not fully decomposed before planting time, you need to remove it, bag it and dispose of it because it may harbor spores. Rototilling the partially decomposed mulch into the soil only allows the fungal spores to survive on the debris in the soil so you aren't doing yourself any favors if you do that.

Nearby weeds in the nightshade family can harbor the disease and then wind, rain, irrigation water or pests (I know flee beetles spread EB spores and assume some other insects do as well) so good weed control helps.

Be sure you spray all your garden tools with a bleach solution too because, like the cages, they may harbor fungal spores. When you remove diseased foliage from plants that have EB, you're supposed to disinfect the pruners after each cut---the thought of doing this just makes me laugh and shake my head. Who has time for that?

A 3-year crop rotation is recommended to try to break the cycle of early blight infection, but most home gardeners do not have separate garden spots far enough away from one another in order to achieve proper crop rotation, so this may not be practical for the average home gardener. I've found that rotating just a few rows away from the area where tomatoes grew (and were infected) the previous year does no good. When I rotate from the front garden to the back garden, a distance of over 300', I can make it more deeply into summer before the EB hits, but it still will show up in the back garden anyway. This has happened even when I rotate tomatoes to the back garden only every third or fourth year. So, I usually just grow the tomatoes in the front garden every year because that's where I have the best soil (and the least trouble with voles)

Like Lee, I just push my plants to hurry up and produce all they can before the EB gets them. Some years, even if June was pretty normal (wet and humid) but then July and August turned really, really dry, I've left the plants with EB in the garden and they have outlasted the EB and started putting out new growth in August. and then get a good fall crop. But, if July and August persist in being humid and wet. the plants are less likely to survive and what works best is to yank out all the infected plants and replace them with new plants in late June (but in a different location) for a fall crop.

It seems like the EB just wins and gets all the plants some years, but that in other years, some varieties can overcome it. I'm not sure there's any rhyme or reason to it. I've tried growing some of Dr. Randy Gardner's varieties bred to tolerate EB, but in my garden, if the other plants get EB, so do those supposedly tolerant varieties.

I've tried growing all tomatoes in large containers (the size of whiskey barrels) filled with a brand-new, sterile soil-less mix some years, and have put the containers halfway between the front garden and the back garden, trying to use the house and barn to shield the container plants from airborne spores. This works somewhat well, but is not a 100% solution. Sooner or later those airborne spores get them.

Growing tomatoes successfully without them contracting early blight seems to be about as difficult as the search for the Holy Grail, so I just fight the battle every year like everyone else. Using the fungicide of your choice, whether it is organic or synthetic in nature, from Day 1 that the plants are put outside can stall off the infection for a pretty long while. It is better to alternate the use of two different fungicides on a regular schedule, and if you're strictly organic, then that would mean alternating Copper with Serenade. If you're not organic, you could alternate copper with chlorothalonil. Or, there are stronger synthetic fungicides but I've never used them and don't feel comfortable commenting on their efficacy. Remember that fungicides do not actually kill the fungal spores. Rather, they coat the plants so that the fungal spores cannot find receptors to attach to, so it is important to cover the tops and bottoms of all leaves as well as all stems. If I am spraying the plants, I thoroughly spray the cages, stakes and plant labels too, figuring it can't hurt and might help.

In my garden, Early Girl and Supersonic seem to rebound from EB better than most other varieties.

You know, you also have to watch and treat your peppers, eggplants and potato plants too because they're nightshades as well and can carry/harbor the EB spores even though they don't seem as prone (in my garden, at least) to sicken with the fungal infection as easily as tomato plants do.

Dawn.

Our issue used used to be early blight, but this year we used a mulch from day 1 to keep soil off and did not have early blight. What we had instead was septoria leaf spot, which we used to have with early blight combined. Anyways, this kills the plants by July usually :/ Next year I hope to preventative spray with a baking soda/dish soap/ vegetable oil spray that I found online from day 1 once a week. I will also be pruning to keep them at 2-3 stems only to maintain airflow. Any less and I feel I'd have bad sunburn on the fruit...If I see ANY sign of blight or leaf spot I will quickly switch to a stronger spray such as Serenade, which has helped prolong blight this year. I may be tempted to use Daconyll but, personally, I'm going to do more research on that first to see if I trust it. Even if using a semi-harmful fungicide, in the end I guess tomatoes sprayed with that are still a lot healthier than most commercially grown tomatoes....I will also not water my leaves as I have in the past! I also will try to plant after it dries up in mid May or early June, assuming it dries up, so that they won't be waterlogged with our spring rains and cool soil. Maybe this will give you some ideas. Good luck. It's a tough battlefield with these fungi!!

Jacob, I know I have created a lot of my Early Blight problems by continuing to grow huge numbers of tomato plants in the same soil year, after year, decade after decade. It is just too hard to pull off proper rotation when a large percentage of my garden is tomatoes, peppers and potatoes. I do mulch---I am the queen of mulching and try to have every square foot of the front garden mulched year-round, continually adding more mulch, so if mulch alone would prevent EB, my plants never would have it. I do think mulching and avoiding overhead watering help prevent its spread, but I also don't think anything prevents it 100%. I also think heavy mulching really helps reduce the incidence of bacterial speck and bacterial spot, so mulching would be worth it just for that reason alone. Since I work so hard on amending the soil every year, I rarely have other tomato diseases at all---and just don't have to worry about them, so at least there's that. I know that people in many areas have to deal with diseases like fusarium and verticillium wilt every year, and know how lucky I am that I never see those here. So, even when dealing with early blight, I may be frustrated with it but nevertheless I am thanking my lucky stars that it isn't something worse.

Septoria Leaf Spot is rarely an issue in my garden. For a long time I could say that I hadn't seen it here at all since 2008, but in the wet years of 2015-17, it did pop up randomly here and there in the garden, though it wasn't widespread and didn't seem nearly as hard on the plants as the early blight is.

This year my main tomato crop is going into big containers in the back yard, midway between the front and back garden. I'm going to see how healthy they stay there. In order to make it a true test, though, I am going to have some tomato plants in the front garden (as far away as possible from the area where I grew last year's crop) and some in the back garden, where I haven't grown tomatoes in several years. The tomato plants always perform best in the back garden, but then voles show up and start eating plant roots so that you can lose the plants literally overnight. If it weren't for the voles, I'd put all my tomato plants in the back garden this year. I'll probably grow half the crop in the back yard containers, and split the other half evenly between the front and back gardens. I want to see if the plants get hit by the EB at the same time in all three areas and also see if my efforts to fight it once it arrives work any differently in any of the three areas.

I have found baking soda sprays seem to work unevenly---better some years than others---but the same can be said of many of the less toxic organic methods we use in order to avoid using synthetic chemicals. I also have used GreenCure, which is potassium bicarbonate instead of sodium bicarbonate and it seems to be more effective. The fact is, though, I prefer to eat tomatoes that have not been sprayed by anything at all, so often I do not spray preventatively and am slow to spray once blight shows up. I'd just rather eat food that's never been sprayed with anything at all. If I were less devoted to eating food that is never sprayed, I'd do a better job of controlling early blight by spraying my plants from the first moment that they go into the ground. (You know, I am the same way with summer squash. It would be so easy to just spray the plants regularly with one of the chemical pesticides, like Bug B Gone, for example and never have to deal with squash bugs, but I cannot bring myself to do it. The gardeners I know here in my area that spray their squash plants regularly with a product like that from the moment they sprout never have squash bugs. But, to me, the thought of using a chemical pesticide every few days to every few weeks is repulsive, so I doubt I ever could go down that path. Instead, I just battle the squash bugs organically which is a lot harder and a lot more time-consuming.)

A friend of mine always grows her tomato plants in holes dug in the lawn surrounded by grass and never has Early Blight or anything else. She doesn't mulch them, just uses a weedeater occasionally to cut the grass (and sometimes she doesn't even do that---to the point that the grass is as tall as the tomato plants). She gets all the tomatoes she needs and more. The key is to rotate to a different part of the lawn every year. I do think she gets somewhat less vigorous plant growth since the grass is competing with the tomato plants for nutrients, but she still gets more tomatoes than her famlly can eat so I consider her growing method successful for meeting her goals. This drives her dad, a traditional row gardener with immaculately maintained, weed-free rows, sort of crazy as she gets better results from her plants than he gets from his. I used to think she was just having beginner's luck, but she's done this for a long time now, so instead of just thinking she is crazy, I'm beginning to think she is crazy like a fox. Also, she does this in very sandy soil. I am not sure it would work as well for someone like me with dense, red clay soil.

At least we don't have late blight here for which I'm grateful since it can wipe out an entire tomato (and potato) planting in just a few days, and almost instantly renders the tomatoes inedible once it hits (you can harvest them, but they'll rot before you can eat them). I suspect our lack of late blight outbreaks here is related to our hot weather so at least we can thank the heat for that.

Dawn

Thanks for the replies, EB effects my tomatoes every year, but not like the last couple years. Usually my plants out grow the disease and I can harvest a few tomatoes until frost. I believe I also had some herbicide drift from the utility company spraying ditches 1/4 mile south of me. Not sure the drift from that distance could cause a problem but the leaves on the beans and peas curled and didn't produce as well as in past years also. Hopeful for a more productive garden this year.

Steve, The last couple of years have been some of the rainiest springs I've experienced since moving to OK in 1999, and that's one reason I think EB has been so widespread so early in the season. I don't know if the same is true of your location.

Rebecca, I agree that it is more of a matter of when than if, but in some drought years, as long as I irrigate only with drip lines or soaker hoses, we can make it through the whole growing season with almost no EB or other fungal diseases. I won't say there's absolutely none, but there's very little. My summers tend to have lower relative humidity values than yours most years, though, so maybe you don't get as much of a break from fungal diseases in drought years as I do. I'm sort of half hoping for a drought year in 2018.....

Dawn

I too have a problem with squirrels eating tomatoes. Originally I thought they were looking for the water in them and I put water out for them away from the garden to no avail. Last year I made a third garden area near the wood, planted tomatoes squash peppers all as extras. That seem to help some, but the voles found those plants. Some years it almost seem like a losing battle.

Dawn, I plan on planting tomatoes in my main garden this year in hopes that might help some as well. We too had a very wet spring last year and record setting rainfall the year before if my memory serves me right.

Y'all, Try putting red Christmas balls on your plants a month or two before you expect ripe tomatoes. It works to thwart birds, who will peck at the hard red balls and give up, and then generally will decide your tomatoes are worthless and leave them alone even after actual real tomatoes start ripening. If the squirrels bite into a red Christmas ball or two, maybe they'll decide that your tomatoes are not for them. I don't know if it will work with squirrels because I've never ever had a squirrel in my garden. They could climb the 8' tall fence (it has wooden poles) but they never have. (and we are on 14.4 acres with about 10 of those being heavily wooded, so we do have squirrels). I think there is at least a chance the red Christmas ornaments might deter the squirrels the same way it does the birds.

Of course, Rebecca's squirrels are very devious and very intelligent. They'll probably take the red Christmas ornaments, hide them, and bring them back out to decorate their own tree next Christmas.

Dawn

Dawn, that's a great idea. I always use fox urine that I order off of Amazon. The first time I used to I literally sprayed it all over the beds thinking that was wonderful idea to deter squirrels, but too much can smell a bit and in turn deter the human from the garden as I found out a day later!! I just put a squirt occasionally here and there. Strangely it doesn't bother the cat one bit but the squirrels, which used to be horrible, will not set foot in the garden. Supposedly they smell fox urine and assume a fox is down there marking its territory...I never smell it either with the amount I squirt out.

Dawn, I tried the christmas ball trick. I'm still collecting pieces of unbreakable ornament from the yard.

Tried the fox urine spray and granules. I don't think they noticed.

And they're apparently Cajun squirrels, because they loved the habanero juice.