Planting Tomatoes

Reader Contribution by Celeste Longacre
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Tomatoes used to be easy to grow. Almost anybody with a garden would plant them often letting them sprawl over the ground in many directions. The long, hot, lazy days of summer would kiss the plants and the bees would buzz and fertilize them voraciously.

Then Came the Blight

Unfortunately, the rise of big box stores brought bugs and diseases from one part of our country to another. The blight, once in the soil, lives for many years and can contaminate new crops for a long time. Rain splashes the organisms up from the soil infecting first the lower leaves then moving up the plant. They get spots, turn brown, wilt and die. If you are lucky, you may get a crop before this occurs. If the weather is damp early in the season, you may not get a crop at all.

Soil specialists with whom I have consulted and interviewed in my book, “Celeste’s Garden Delights,” have reassured me that—if your plants get absolutely everything that they need—they cannot be eaten by bugs (the sugars are too high) and they are not susceptible to disease. In our depleted soils, this is generally not the case. But last year I gave my tomatoes some extra care and the blight didn’t make its appearance until nearly the end of the summer. Here’s what I did:

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