Cornell Cooperative Extension of Putnam County

Late Blight,
And End-of-the-Season Veggie Garden Clean-up.

If you, like so many other enthusiastic vegetable gardeners, watched your tomatoes succumb to late blight this year and melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West, you may wonder what to do to clean up your garden this fall.

The answers may be simpler than you think! Late blight can only winter-over in live plant tissue. In our area the only likely way this can happen is in a potato tuber accidentally left in the garden bed. If you grow tomatoes and potatoes, be especially vigilant in digging up those potatoes!

For more information on late blight, check out this link:
http://www.longislandhort.cornell.edu/vegpath/lbfaq.pdf

For garden clean-up after other tomato diseases, such as Septoria leaf spot, check out the section on http://www.gardening.cornell.edu/homegardening/scene7af3.html that discusses cleaning up your garden and discarding debris!