Quote:
Originally Posted by cythaenopsis
^ As depressing the thought may be, have you considered curtailing gardening for a year and excavating all of the contaminated soil? It really sounds to me like the fusarium is managing to entrench itself so it can flourish year after year... unless there's some other source nearby that you're unaware of.
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I actually did that for a couple of beds one year and it helped for about a year. That is back breaking work which I can no longer do and the grafting is working great for me now. I wish I had known about it years ago when all I was planting were the more tasteless but very fusarium resistant hybrids which I could have used for rootstock instead of eating tomatoes. When I tired of the flavor of those commercial style tomatoes I went with staggered planting of heirlooms so that I had new plants continually coming in to replace the dying ones. Even though very few plants lasted more than three months, with the repeated plantings I was able to keep my family and friends in tomatoes from late spring til late fall most years. I even got a few heirlooms that lasted most of the season and that is how I got one of the rootstock I am using now.
With grafting I get heirloom plants that produce far longer. Even when I used plants with only resistance to two races of fusarium they lasted at least a month longer than the scion would typically last so production was much higher. The more resistant rootstock have given me a good many plants that look like they will last the whole season and we have a very long season.
You have to realize I have been battling fusarium since the beginning of this garden 35 years ago so I have tried just about everything in my efforts to coexist with it. The only thing that has really worked well besides planting some of the more bulletproof hybrids is grafting onto rootstock that are very resistant to fusarium. I think one of the reasons the only tomatoes you see in the grocery stores now are so tasteless is those are the varieties that are resistant to fusarium and nematodes and can be grown successfully in the warmer climates.
Bill