Beat Tomato Blight with These Resistant Types

Text by Niki Jabbour for the March/April 2018 issue ofHorticulture.

Blight is the nightmare that haunts many a tomato gardener, slashing yields or even wiping out plants before they can set fruit. There are two main culprits: early blight and late blight.

Early blight (Alternaria solani) is a nuisance that causes plants to yellow from the bottom up. It won't kill your plants outright, but it weakens them, looks awful, and can definitely cut into your harvest. You can slow it down by mulching around the plants to keep fungal spores from splashing onto the foliage, and by removing lower leaves as they start to yellow.

Late blight (Phytophthera infestans), on the other hand, is a killer. Once the symptoms show up, it's too late—within a day or two, the entire plant looks like it's been torched. Late blight tends to strike later in the season when there's been a lot of moisture combined with warm temperatures. It's an unwelcome but thankfully infrequent visitor to my garden, though it has become more common in the Northeast in recent years.

The good news is that plant breeders have been hard at work on blight-resistant tomato varieties. They've come up with a number of hybrids that show excellent resistance to late blight, early blight, and several other common tomato diseases. Here are four worth growing:

Mountain Merit bears medium to large fruits on compact, four-foot-tall plants. This 2014 All-America Selections winner is resistant to multiple tomato diseases and yields up to 45 fruits per plant. The flavor is on the mild side.

The name says it all for 'Defiant'! This one matures early with richly flavored, round red fruits. It's a bush-type tomato, perfect for pots or garden beds, producing medium-size six- to eight-ounce tomatoes that are great for slicing and salads. Highly resistant to late blight, it also shows intermediate resistance to early blight and verticillium wilt.

'Jasper', another All-America Selections winner, has become my go-to cherry tomato for its resistance to late blight and several other common tomato diseases. It's also ridiculously productive, with fruits ready to pick just two months after transplant. The harvest of sweet cherry-size tomatoes keeps coming right up until frost.

A recent introduction, 'Cherry Bomb' shows strong late-blight resistance. The very vigorous plants pump out a large crop of bright red cherry tomatoes. It's also early to mature, with fruits ready to harvest just 64 days from transplanting.

Catch up with expert vegetable gardener Niki Jabbour at savvygardening.com.

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