Preventing Disease in Tomatoes Farm
1. Rotate your crops: Since many Tomato pathogens live in the soil Plant tomatoes in a different spot in the garden each year.
2. Pinch off leaves with any signs of disease immediate and dispose of them in the trash to keep a possible infection from spreading.
3. Don’t work in the garden when tomato foliage is wet or you may inadvertently spread pathogens from plant to plant.
Choose disease-resistant varieties when selecting which types of tomatoes to grow.
5. Remove all diseased tomato plant debris at the end of the growing season and burn it or toss it in the trash. Do not put diseased foliage in the compost pile.
6. If you keep your tomato plants from one year to the next (here are 4 ways to overwinter tomato plants), be sure the plants are disease-free when you overwinter them.
7. Provide adequate air circulation around each plant. Here’s our guide to spacing tomatoes properly.
8. Mulch your tomato plants well at the start of the season. Two or three inches of compost, leaf mold, straw, or hay serves to keep soil-dwelling fungal spores from splashing up onto the lower leaves when it rains.
9. Try to keep the foliage dry whenever possible. Hand irrigation or soaker hoses allow you to target the water on the root zone. The splash from overhead sprinklers can spread disease and wet foliage promotes fungal issues.
10. Disinfect the empty pots if you grow your tomatoes in containers, using a 10% bleach solution at the end of the growing season and replace the spent potting soil with a new mix every spring.
