Black Spots On Tomatoes - Common And Hard to Control

When you find you are in the middle of the growing season, sixty or seventy days have already passed, and you are now seeing black spots on tomatoes, you will want to take actions right away. Planning for next year will be a part of that action plan. You are guarding against the common culprit called tomato blight.

By avoiding the disease for the coming year tomatoes, you will rotate the location of the tomatoes you plant the next growing season to avoid being blighted again. It would be best to plant tomatoes away from that soil area where the blight occurred for at least four years to avoid blight again.

The spots of black on the tomatoes often are on the shoulders of the tomatoes. The early signs of the blight are leaves falling off and large brown spots on the leaves. The tomatoes will be small, and develop spots on them. The tomatoes slowly shrivel and blacken. The blight tomato disease thrives in hot, humid muggy weather. The disease of blight is so hard to control because it grows so fast. The tomato plant is infected by the blight, then the spots start to be seen on the leaves.

Weather Conditions Offer Predictions

It is the wet and hot weather that attracts the blight. As soon as spots are seen on the leaves, the gardener will start a spraying campaign, but often the next day the tomato is entirely spotted and the fruit starts to get the black spots, and then the whole tomato plant dies. It can spread fast to the rest of the plants.

Preventing blight on tomatoes requires using flood irrigation instead of spraying on the leaves. To control blight from affecting tomatoes, start with a regular treatment of Dithane or Virikop sprays and use them every two weeks. An alternative to those chemically based insecticide repellents is to use 20 grams of bicarbonate of soda diluted in ten liters of water and spray biweekly.

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