Late blight is rapidly spreading among gardens in upstate NY. I belong to a community garden and many people have lost all of their plants. Often the disease progresses from a few small spots in one section of a plant to infecting the entire plant in a day and a half! The weather we are having (70's daytime, 50's at night, rain most every day) has been ideal for the disease's rapid spread.

I also have a garden at home, and that has not been effected yet. I try to garden organically, but i'll be spraying my home tomato plants with Fung-onil (chlorothalonil) tomorrow. I hope I can save them.

Tomatoes, potatoes, and yes, petunias are the main targets of the disease. Plants effected with late blight should be bagged and discarded (in the trash - not composted!). This is a serious threat to commercial growers since the spores can travel for miles by wind. Be careful not to shake the plants too much as you bag them so you don't send too many spores into the wind. You may have gotten the spores on your plants from a neighbor's infected garden.

Frankly, I'm surprised there has been relatively little posting about this since it is big news around here.

It HAS been posted about extensively on GW this spring!

The question is, will late blight exhibit the symptoms i described above, ie. no foliage symptoms but a rather quick drying out and hollowing out of the lower portion of a stem? I can only specifically identify one plant exhibiting typical late blight symptoms. The petunias and one of my bucket grown tomatoes could be a wilt (fusarium?).

On a side note the sale and use of any and all usefull fungicide has been banned in Ontario as of april 22, 2009. Go figure.

andy toms

Sorry for the side-track there.

Is there any way you can post photos of your plants? Even with photos, it can be difficult for someone else to diagnose problems, of course, but maybe some things can be ruled out, the field narrowed.

Also, did you buy your plants, and from where, or did you start them from seeds?

Finally, has the sale of Serenade been banned in Ontario? It's an organic fungicide that a lot of people swear by.

I did some research--You may have southern blight. This site says that it attacks the stem at the soil line. They say to pull all infected plants and what to treat the rest with. Check it out.

http://gardening.about.com/od/vegetablepatch/a/TomatoProblems.htm

Can't post pictures as i took out the affected tomato and petunia plants then bagged them and dumped them. I tried matching what i saw with pics on-line but the symptoms didn't fit much of anything. The only reason i'm thinking blight is because the one plant in-groung was definetly showing symptoms of it and it does seem to get airborne.
On the other hand 1 tomato and 2 separate and different containers of petunias only showed a drying up and hollowing of the lower portion of a few stems, with no signs of anything on the foliage (other than the wilting of perfectly green leaves as they were now attached to a dead stem). The stem section on the tomato plant that was dry was no longer than 3", about a foot up from the soil line. Only one stem so far on the tomato plant and 2-3 stems on each affected petunia.

I don't know the full list of banned stuff but there wasn't a single bottle of anything resembling a fungicide on the shelves of 5 different stores i visited. Yet, i bet you, the 10 golf courses around my town are pouring the stuff on by the gallon to keep their greens perfectly green. I have to stop now or i'll go into rant mode. ;)

Just as an update i think figured out what the disease is -Botrytis. No further damage as yet, our temperatures are up and rains have stopped.