Best Practices for Gardening and Mental Health: Final Tomato Harvest Hastened by Fungi

Today at the garden, we had the final harvest of our tomato plants. Some members of our garden community wished we could keep the plants in the ground until every single tomato turned red. However, today because of the spread of three common types of mold and fungi, we needed to pull all the remaining plants before the fungus was able to spread to other plants in the garden.

Because of the fungus on the tomatoes, we were unable to put the tomato plants in our garden compost and disposed of the plants in our city compost bins.

Below are some photos of the tomato plants in our garden and the information shared at today's skill share about blight and fungus of tomato plants.

You'll notice from the photo on the left that many of our plants had several branches that had dry wilting leaves. A majority of the tomato plants looked very similar to the one in the photo.

When one stem of the tomato plant is dried out, it's typically Fusarium and Verticillium Wilt.

In the photo to the left you can see white mold that had not only infected our tomato plants, but had also spread to the tomatillos.

Late blight, as seen in the picture below, was found in almost all of the tomato plants in our garden.

It is identified by round black marks on the tomatoes, sections of brown splotches on otherwise green tomato stems and brown spots on the tomato leaves. You can find more information and photos in the video below.

The photos below show tomatoes that would have been possible to harvest if they were removed last Wednesday, when part of the plants that had died were removed. Less than three days later the blight rotted the tomatoes and made them inedible. This not only showed us how quickly the fungus could spread in our garden, but also let us know that if we didn't harvest the tomatoes today they would not have lasted until our next garden meeting on Monday.