1. Clean cultural practices reduce all fungal diseases. Do not compost tomato waste--burn it or throw it in the trash.
2. Mulch your soil so rain does not splash soil up on your plants.
3. Keep your plants and fruit trellised or caged with the bottom suckers pruned off so they do not touch the ground.
4. If you are a practitioner of the organic method, use aerated compost tea with molasses and baking soda as a foliar feed. Others use cornmeal or hydrogen pyroxide instead of baking soda and report success. Some folks spray milk, but that never worked for me.
5. Till in cornmeal in the spring and fall if you till.
6. Never touch your plants or fruit when they are wet. Keep a weak bleach solution in a bucket to rinse your hands and tools when moving from plant to plant so as to avoid spreading disease. I use torn Goodwill bedsheets to tie up my tomatoes to the trellis and soak them in weak bleach solution before I use them.
7. Continually improve the quality of your soil with compost and test for Ph to see if you need lime, as many mid-mississippi valley soils do. Better soil means healthier plants, which in turn are more disease resistant.
8. Make your garden attractive for predators who eat leafhoppers to reduce their role in spreading disease.
The first couple of years after I bought my formerly non-organic place I had a lot of trouble with fungal diseases. Things were out of balance. Not enough birds, bees, dragonflies, and insect predators, and nutrient weak soil.
Through the religious application of the above practices, I still get some fungal disease, but not very much, and the plants have a better fighting chance
In sum--look at things from the plant's point of view. Good food, reduction in opportunity for fungal diseses to attack through soil or animal (man and insect) sources makes the plant healthy and more capable of withstanding the onslaught.
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