Just two hundred miles south of you and I have a totally different experience with disease. Neves has always been one of the most disease tolerant of all the open pollinated varieties that I have grown but sometimes like you say when the fruit load is so heavy even it is susceptible. From my past experience trying to grow tomatoes before grafting in my fusarium infested soil Neves was the most dependable variety that wasn't a hybrid and in fact frequently tolerated the fusarium as well as Big Beef, Goliath and Bella Rosa. In fact the last year I grew un-grafted plants it even outperformed all of the double FF resistant hybrids I was growing then. I actually had my longest vine ever from a NAR grafted plant about five years ago. It was over 25 feet long and still producing after eight months in the ground when it froze.
Since Arkansas Traveler is one of my absolute favorites and one of the more dependable producers I hate to say it but it can show more susceptibility to Early Blight than many other varieties some years. Even with that weakness it still out produces most varieties year after year in the sweltering heat of lower Alabama.
I no longer grow Cherokee Purple due to disease issues I had with it and the lower fruit production that I had with it. But the potato leaf variety of CP known as Spudakee is one of my favorites. I should say that if I had some CP seed I might see if it did much better now since I am grafting because it was so much more susceptible to fusarium than was Spudakee which I replaced it with. From the one or two successful plants that I did grow I do remember it as very good tasting and producing larger fruit than Spudakee usually does. Maybe I'll give it a try when grafting next year since you speak so highly of it.
Bill
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