Thread: bleach spray
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Old June 11, 2013   #22
b54red
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Alabama
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Originally Posted by tammy View Post
My tomatoes were wilting, curling and dying, my county extension agent was sure it was late blight. I went out this morning before this confirmation and heavily sprayed with the bleach solution. Do I still need to follow up with a copper product? my agent recommended copper dragon.
tammy
You could have Late Blight but you could also have Gray Mold which can look very similar. The biggest difference to me is Gray Mold usually starts in the middle or lower interior of the plant while LB usually starts showing the first symptoms higher on the plant. If you do have Late Blight then most plants showing the symptoms are going to die soon and the bleach will speed that along. That is a good thing because Late Blight will spread to the other plants in your patch. I have only seen Late Blight once this early in the year and that was quite a few years ago. It was the first time I had ever encountered it and it started on only a few plants but within two weeks every plant had it and they all died. I tried every fungicide I could buy but none of them helped. A friend of mine about a mile away lost all of his plants in an even shorter time that month from the same thing. To get LB this time of the year down here is a disaster because the plants are loaded with fruit that is just starting to ripen and LB can ruin most of the fruit.

I started seeing LB a little more often when I started growing fall plants but it is still fairly rare for me. I have had it three times in the fall and the last time I recognized it immediately and started the bleach spray that day and repeated it every couple of days for about 10 days and I only lost two plants and had one or two others sustain some minor damage. I think keeping up the bleach spray stopped the spread by killing the spores before they could get going in the plants that weren't showing any symptoms yet and thus it really did work on Late Blight. That was the third time I used it on LB and the most successful. The first time I waited far too long and the second time I waited a little too long and ended up losing half my plants. Just pulling out and removing the plants showing symptoms will not stop the spread of LB or at least it didn't for me the first time I tried that. I think the disease is already sending out spores when you notice the symptoms so you need to kill the spores before they can infect other nearby tomatoes. I spray every plant in the garden when I get LB and I spray the ground around the infected plants. I also increase the strength of my mix just a little when dealing with LB because it is so deadly. I'd rather have a little leaf burn than no plants.

I wish you could post some good pictures showing the disease on your plants both the whole plant and the diseased areas close up.

Bill
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