A few garden strategies in the fight against fungus, disease

By Rennie Phillips

We moved out where we now live a little over 20 years ago. Our neighbor Clem Lindeman brought over his tractor and used a chisel plow to dig up the old garden spot. It was pure sod and hadn't been used in several years. Once he had it kind of torn up, I went to work with a front-tine tiller. It was a chore to say the least. This garden was about 70x100 feet.

The garden did decent, but not spectacular. It had some problems with bugs, fungus and weeds. We had the most problems with the weeds. There is a kind of vining grass that is impossible to pull and kill. It's like you pull one piece and two come up. Then there is a kind of liriope. Even Roundup has a tussle with that stuff. I never even thought about not using Roundup; it was a regularly-used chemical where we live.

Our tomatoes did fair, but disease or fungus got a bunch of them. They would grow like gangbusters and put on fruit and really look good, then problems would develop. There was one spot in the garden where the tomato plant would be fine one night and then wilted and dying the next morning. I would lose five or six a year this way. It wasn't cutworms. At times the plant might live, but it wouldn't be worth anything. So I eventually just pulled the wilted plant and burned it. I always wondered if it was fusarium wilt.

Then my healthy plants with tomatoes on them would begin to turn yellow right down by the ground. The leaves would slowly turn yellow a stem at a time. If I didn't prune it off, it would eventually die and fall off. So I started pruning them off as they turned yellow. I read that it was probably early blight and came from the ground, so I started to put newspapers around my plants -- at least one layer thick and at least a foot on all sides. I would then cover the newspaper with straw, and it worked like a champ part of the time. And I also started to prune off all the branches up about 10 inches or so.

I noticed that if the straw was the least bit moldy it seemed to affect the tomatoes. So I paid closer attention to the straw, making sure it was good, clean straw. This helped. Probably the best year I ever had with my tomatoes was when I used wood chips on top of the newspapers and between the rows as well. The whole inside of my high tunnels was covered with wood chips. I didn't have a problem with fungus that year at all. I thought I had the solution. So the next year I pulled the wood chips from around my tomatoes and reused them. Mistake! The fungus was awful. I always figured that the chips got dust and dirt in them and it spread to the tomato plants.

I honestly think the best mulch is grass clippings. Fresh grass clippings with no chemicals on the grass. Vic brought up a bunch of clippings last year, and I used them around my tomato plants. They did really good. The disease gradually got my tomato plants, but I picked a bunch of tomatoes before they died.

Now for this year. Last year I used a 3-foot wide plastic mulch in our hill garden or bigger outdoor garden. I planted zucchini in this mulch and actually had some make it through the entire summer and stay alive. This is a miracle in itself. I don't know why, but the squash bugs didn't seem to attack them like normal.

Anyway, my plans are to use this mulch in at least one of my high tunnels. You make about a 2-foot wide raised bed about 6 inches high with a furrow down both sides. I then lay down my dripper hose (we talked about that last week) the full length of the raised bed. Then I simply begin to unroll the 3-foot wide plastic mulch down this raised bed covering both sides in that trench, which secures the plastic mulch.

When it comes time to plant my tomatoes, I'll simply plant them through the plastic mulch. So from the get-go my tomatoes will be protected from the dirt, which I think is the source of the early blight. This might not help, but I'm sure going to give it a try.

There are times when I've sprayed daconil fungicide, but I hate to use it. Last year I didn't spray, and the early blight eventually got all my tomatoes. But there is this year.

I had a reader ask what I did for a disease that sounded a lot like early blight. So I checked a whole list of tomato varieties that are resistant to early blight. Turns out one of the ones I grow is one of just a handful that is resistant. The name of the variety is Plum Regal. It is a paste-type tomato that tastes pretty darn good. It is between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 inches long and up to 2 inches across, similar to a Roma.

Through the years, I've tried things that really work, and then there have been times when it royally flopped. Here is to hoping this year's garden is full of success with very few flops.