Blight

Blight does tend to go round allotments like wildfire but some varieties have greater resistance than others.  I find beefsteak tomatoes like Marmande much more susceptible than cherry tomatoes like Gardeners' Delight.   How you grow the tomatoes appears less important than the variety you grow.   Indoor tomatoes survive better but at the expense of flavour.   When blight is likely to strike, harvesting green tomatoes to ripen indoors is a good strategy to adopt as they will ripen well off the plant if given enough time.

Luckily (phew and fingers crossed), we haven't had blight this year, but something else strange has happened...

Two years ago, a chum gave me just one tom from his first 'Mountain Magic', which are supposed to be resistant. I grew some last year and they were alright, but this year, they're refusing to turn red, and are staying yellow! It's on just two plants out of about eight.

Chums here may remember an experiment I tried a few years ago, with sowing old Crimson Crush seeds, and ending up with two distinctive arrays of fruit and leaves, all from the same seed lot! One strain, with a very broad leaf, just motored, while the other faded and stopped with the hump!

The following year, we only grew the broad-leafed plants and they just went berserk, and were superb, but incredibly distorted, and very plain to look at, (although the fruit was just fine)!

Now we don't have 'The Patch', I've rather stopped experimenting, as there's only a largish garden to work in, and there are other things we like just as well!

I'll let you know if the Mountain Magic ever start to blush - which they may well do after a few well-chosen syllables from yours truly...