An older hybrid, 'Ferline', fits into the same category it will hold up under light disease pressure but will succumb when things get really bad. The variety Jeremy grew with such excellent results was 'Fantasio', which likely has single-gene resistance to late blight.
While US gardeners have plenty of choices among disease-resistant tomatoes, the only up-to-date variety available in the UK appears to be 'Jasper', which has earned an RHS Award of Merit. See the alphabetized list below of these blight-resistant tomato varieties. More recently, super-resistant 'Iron Lady' was added to the list, along with 'Jasper', a tasty red cherry. In 2012, when researchers in New York evaluated late blight tolerance in 35 tomato varieties, the winners were an interesting mix of hybrids ('Defiant', 'Plum Regal', 'Mountain Magic 'and 'Mountain Merit') and heirlooms 'Lemon Drop', 'Matt's Wild Cherry', and 'Mr. The variety I grew, 'Mountain Magic', came directly from Gardner's program, but several more blight- resistant tomato varieties show the finishing touches of other breeders – including home gardeners who work with heirlooms. Gardner and his team began making progress with blight resistance in the late 1980s, but their great gift to the gardening world came in 2010, when they released an ensemble of breeding lines with multigenic resistance to both blights to anyone who wanted to work with them. Randy Gardner, Professor Emeritus at North Carolina State University, who has been breeding better tomatoes for more than 30 years. And not to worry, these genes were manipulated using traditional breeding techniques, mostly under the direction of Dr. Moisture and plenty of it is required to bring late blight to life, but problems have become much more widespread in recent years, especially in the north and eastern US, where late blight of tomato has gone from being an occasional problem to a constant concern.Įnter new varieties imbued with two or more genes that give them excellent resistance to late blight, and some resistance to early blight, too. Unlike early blight, late blight on tomatoes develops later in the summer, and always following a period of prolonged rain. Caused by a fungus-like oospore, late blight ( Phytophthera infestans) also devastates potatoes.
Late blight does kill tomato plants, and once the killing starts there is no stopping it. Early blight weakens tomato plants but does not kill them. Evidence of this extremely common disease are plants with withered foliage to about 18 inches (46 cm) from the ground, with healthy green growth higher up. Early blight needs damp leaf surfaces to prosper, so the shaded leaves low down on the plant, which dry slowly, wither from early blight while lovely new growth continues higher up, where sunshine and wind keep the leaves comparatively dry. Tomatoes in a wide range of climates are bothered by early blight ( Alternaria solani), a fungal disease that causes dark spots to form on the lowest leaves. We both grew blight-resistant tomato varieties for the first time, and now we can't wait to try more of these naturally healthy tomatoes.įirst let's clarify what we mean by "blight". Eventually they did, of course, but with the help of special genes, the plants did not melt down with late blight following periods of rainy weather. Even though our gardens are more than three thousand miles apart, GrowVeg founder Jeremy Dore and I experienced similar tomato miracles in our gardens last year: the plants did not die.
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