Tomatoes should now be covered in flowers and starting to fruit, but gardeners need to keep a close eye on their plants if they want to get any harvest at all in July. It has been extremely hot in the UK for the last few weeks, which should concern gardeners as it means the risk of tomato blight is a lot higher than usual.
Blight first appears as big dark blotches all over tomato leaves, and it will very quickly spread up the plant and cause brown patches to appear all over the red fruit. What is so concerning about blight is that it once tomatoes are infected, there is no cure, and the spores can stay in the soil, so it can continue to destroy your garden crops every year. However, Monty Don, Britain’s most famous gardener known for the BBC series Gardeners’ World, has it can be easy to prevent blight with an easy task that should take less than five minutes of effort.
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 that spreads through tiny spores carried by water, and it is more likely to affect tomatoes when it rains after there has been a heatwave.
Spores tend to linger in the soil, and once it rains, the water can splash onto the lower leaves of a tomato plant, which can cause blight to quickly begin spreading.
Taking the time to prune the tomato properly in July will prevent this splashback and also allow more airflow around the plant, so they dry quicker after it has rained making becoming infected less likely.
There is no remedy to blight, so taking the time to prevent it now is the only way to keep tomatoes healthy and ensure your hard work in the garden does not go to waste this July.
How to prune tomato plants in summer
To begin, you can use a clean pair or scissors, but it is also fine to just pinch the leaves off by hand.
Make sure you cut off the right leaves on the tomato plant. You should remove any leaves below the lowest truss, as well as any that touch the soil or appear damaged.
Do not prune the tomato heavily, as plants get their energy from their leaves, and cutting too much off means it will not be able to produce a lot of fruit.
It is better to only remove one to three leaves at a time and wait a few days between pruning sessions to get the best fruit possible from the tomato plants.
Pruning tomatoes should take no more than five minutes and can be done roughly once a week in July, and it is an effective way to keep the plant healthy, so you can achieve a better harvest this summer.
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