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Post by lavandulagirl on Aug 9, 2009 19:58:31 GMT -5
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Post by PatrickW on Aug 9, 2009 21:53:34 GMT -5
I like how this blight outbreak is being billed in many places as the 'fault' of home gardeners. This is just such perverted logic.
Never mind all the commercial agricultural practices like not rotating crops, excessive fungicide, other chemical use and monocultures that are the underlying cause of the problem.
It's like when bird flu broke out a couple of years ago in factory farms, then was spread from one factory farm to the next by wild migratory birds and small holdings. Of course it wasn't the fault of the large unsanitary factory farms hosting and fostering the disease, it was the fault of migratory birds and people keeping small flocks!
Sometimes I think all of us people on this planet are just in the way of big business, and they should just get rid of us all.
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Post by silverseeds on Aug 9, 2009 22:06:30 GMT -5
Sometimes I think all of us people on this planet are just in the way of big business, and they should just get rid of us all.
well unfortunately I fear some of them might agree with you, lol
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Post by flowerpower on Aug 10, 2009 4:32:33 GMT -5
He showed me where he had pulled out his late blight-infected tomato plants and replaced them with beans and an extra crop of Brussels sprouts for the fall. He won’t make the same profit as he would have from the tomato harvest, but he wasn’t complaining, either." My county is on NY's list of blight affected areas. Believe me, the commercial farmers are complaining. Plus, much of the sweet corn has been flooded out this yr. And that is the biggest legal crop inthe county. Many of the big farms in the valley have been flooded out. I bought a few fesh maters from some farm. It was totally tasteless. All my friends who bought starts lost their plants weeks ago. I lost one plant. I bought it at the college plant sale. The ones I grew from seed are affected. But it is not spreading very fast. And one variety has shown no signs of blight at all- "Garden Peach". It may just be its location in the garden. Also, a cherry mater called "Tocan" seems slightly resistant. (Thanks, Jim )
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Post by flowerpower on Aug 10, 2009 4:51:22 GMT -5
Here's the local farmers moving their corn by raft, The Schoharie Creek flooded. Little islands of sweet corn survived. www.timesjournalonline.com/
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Post by PatrickW on Aug 10, 2009 6:39:18 GMT -5
This has been an ongoing issue here in Amsterdam for a long time. Blight was the disease behind the Irish Potato Famine 150 years ago, and this part of Europe is home to blight. It hits almost every summer, and it's almost down to an exact science now. There are weather stations in every potato growing region, all tied together and computerized. Whenever a 'Mills Period' (the right conditions for an infection) is eminent, farmers are notified and start spraying. They have to continue spraying until harvest.
I used to borrow a piece of land I used as a garden in a local potato growing region, and how I saw those potatoes grown was so disgusting, I have totally stopped eating commercial potatoes. It was just farming by numbers, like children paint by numbers. First the fertilizer, then the pesticides, then the fungicides, then more pesticides... The top soil in the area was completely depleted, and the farmers just grew the potatoes directly in the clay, year after year, in the same spot.
And yes, whenever there was an outbreak of blight, all the farmers looked around to see who's fault it was. Who was trying to grow potatoes organically? An organic farm or a home gardener? It was always the fault of the person who didn't spray their potatoes.
The commercial farmers even got together a few years ago and got a series of laws passed aimed at organic farmers and home gardeners. It's now illegal in Holland and many neighboring countries to plant potatoes or tomatoes in the same spot more than once every three years (unless you're a commercial farmer who sprays), and if you have infected plants in your garden you must remove or spray them. In theory if you break these rules, the police can remove your plants or spray your land, but I haven't honestly ever heard of these laws being enforced. It's a very emotional issue here, and farmers get easily upset over it.
In my opinion, these rules do very little to prevent outbreaks, and do little beyond making organic potatoes more expensive. Among the ways these laws discriminate against organic farmers is if your potato plants become infected, the solution is often to remove the foliage and leave the tubers in the ground. Organic farmers have to do this by hand, where commercial farmers can use herbicide to kill off the tops of the plants. This means organic farmers can never have a farm so large they can't manage to do this.
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Post by robertb on Aug 10, 2009 6:47:00 GMT -5
We had a devastating outbreak on my allotment site last month, when no farmer within 15 miles had reported it, and there were no widespread outbreaks anywhere in the Midlands. That has to be something spreading from gardens. I think education would help, but we desperately need to be growing resistant varieties. That's fine for maincrop spuds, but not so easy for earlies - second earlies have been affected by blight in the last few years - and my toms have been wiped out three years in a row. Not many people do grow them outside here though.
If retailers in the US have been selling diseased plants, the fault lies with them not with the gardeners who buy them.
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Post by PatrickW on Aug 10, 2009 7:35:53 GMT -5
I agree completely Robert! Gardeners have a responsibility too, and you certainly shoot yourself in the foot if you don't remove diseased plants. Especially for allotments/community gardens, you have an important responsibility to your fellow gardeners. It's farmers blaming gardeners that I don't have a lot of sympathy with...
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Post by lavandulagirl on Aug 10, 2009 18:48:39 GMT -5
Gardeners have a responsibility too, and you certainly shoot yourself in the foot if you don't remove diseased plants. I have run up against resistance in this, when running educational seminars in the past. Some growers, especially the backyard sort, kind of see each plant like they'd see a puppy... they want to save them all, no matter what. While I appreciate a certain amount of emotional attachment, pulling at the first sign of a disease like blight is SO neccessary.
I wish the spin on this editorial went more towards avoiding buying started plants from big box stores, but I guess I should be happy that they're gardening at all. Unfortunately, crop loss may discourage a lot of newbies.
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