Tomatoes should be laden with flowers and beginning to bear fruit by now, but gardeners must monitor their plants carefully if they hope to achieve any harvest whatsoever come July. The UK has experienced exceptionally hot weather over recent weeks, which should worry growers as it means the threat of tomato blight is considerably higher than normal.
What Is Tomato Blight?
Blight initially manifests as large dark blotches across tomato foliage, and it spreads rapidly up the plant, causing brown patches to develop all over the red fruit. What makes blight particularly worrying is that once tomatoes become infected, there's no remedy, and the spores can remain in the soil, meaning it can continue devastating your garden crops year after year.
However, Monty Don, Britain's best-known gardener famed for the BBC programme Gardeners' World, has revealed it can be straightforward to prevent blight with a simple task requiring less than five minutes of work.
Monty Don's Simple Prevention Method
On his website, Monty said: "The best defence for outdoor tomatoes is good ventilation and stripping off the lower leaves as the fruits develop helps this, as well as helping the ripening tomatoes have maximum exposure to sun."
Blight is a fungal plant disease transmitted through microscopic spores carried by water, and it's more liable to affect tomatoes when rainfall follows a heatwave, reports the Express. Spores typically linger in the soil, and once rain arrives, water can splash onto the lower foliage of a tomato plant, which can trigger blight to rapidly start spreading.
Why Pruning Helps
Taking the time to properly prune your tomatoes in July will help prevent this splashback while also boosting airflow around the plant, allowing them to dry out more quickly after rainfall and reducing the risk of infection. Since there is no cure for blight, taking preventative action now is the only way to keep your tomatoes healthy and ensure your hard work in the garden isn't wasted this July.
How to Prune Tomato Plants in Summer
To get started, a clean pair of scissors will do the job, though it's perfectly fine to simply pinch the leaves off by hand. Ensure you're removing the correct leaves from the tomato plant. Any leaves below the lowest truss should be taken off, along with those touching the soil or showing signs of damage.
Avoid over-pruning your tomatoes, as plants draw their energy from their leaves, and cutting away too much will hinder fruit production. It's advisable to remove just one to three leaves at a time, leaving a few days between each pruning session to get the very best from your tomato plants.
Pruning your tomatoes should take no longer than five minutes and can be carried out roughly once a week throughout July. It's a highly effective way to maintain a healthy plant and achieve a bumper harvest this summer.
