Robert Spear is just starting to harvest the plump, green tomatoes weighing down the plants covering his fields. Workers have already picked some from the 15 greenhouses on the farm.
“I’m really pleased with it so far,” he said, standing among the green rows of vegetation in the late morning sun on Thursday.
Other farms around the state haven’t been so lucky, having had whole crops wiped out by the infamous fungus called “late blight.” Spear’s family farm didn’t escape the blight completely, he explained.
He said they had some late blight in tomato plants growing in a couple of their greenhouses, and found, with some help from members of the University of Maine Cooperative Extension office, three or four plants in a field they thought might be infected with the fungus. Spear said they yanked up the plants right away and put them in plastic garbage bags for disposal off the farm.
“A lot of people don’t realize what goes into growing a tomato,” farm co-owner and Robert’s wife, Janice Spear, said.
Beginning in March, workers on Spear’s Farm transplant tomato plants, starting with seed, three times. It takes four months for the plants to grow and produce, the Spears said.
The tomato plants growing in the fields, most of which are called, “Sunsation,” were treated with a fungicide.
The farm has been working with recommendations from the Extension office. Spear said they work with an integrated pest management program to reduce the need for the use of fungicides. He said the plants have stayed very healthy.
They also grow Prime Red and Roma tomato plants in the fields. The tomato plants affected by late blight in some of his greenhouses were Big Beef.
If not attended, an infection of late blight could wipe out a whole crop within three days, Spear said. After disposing of any suspected plants, the Spears killed their one-acre of potato plants. He said their potatoes were early and had good growth.
Potato plants are most likely to get late blight first, so they killed the plants. This didn’t affect the potatoes that had grown in the ground. Spear said they just got rid of the plants on top of the ground, as they didn’t want to run the risk of spreading potential fungus to the tomato plants.
Rick Kersbergen of the University of Maine Cooperative Extension in Waldo County said the fungus survives in living tissue, which is why they recommend burning or throwing away affected plants.
“We are asking people to clean up the plant material and throw it out,” he said, emphasizing that people should not throw affected plants into compost.
Kersbergen said imported plants are suspected as being the cause of the widespread late blight fungus that devastated so many tomato crops. The suspicion is that a plant breeder selling to large retail chains brought it in. The strain the Extension is dealing with came from imported plant material from Alabama, Kersbergen said.
People who suspect the plants of having blight and take down the plants while leaving potatoes to grow in the ground should keep an eye on the potatoes stored after harvest, as the blight might still have affected them. Kersbergen said potatoes should be safe to eat if the blight had not spread into the roots of the plant.
Tomatoes are similar. Once late blight makes its appearance on tomato plants and stem, it is likely it has affected the fruit of the plant, as well. Kersbergen said the tomatoes might still be okay to eat if they visibly show no signs of blight, but he recommends people not can tomatoes that had been picked from an infected plant.
Professional growers and people from the Cooperative Extension say there are significant differences between late and early blight. Late blight will take a plant down completely, Kersbergen said. The lesions are very different, too, and it is easy to spot.
Kersbergen describes the leaves on a plant with late blight as being soaked on top of the leaf surface and with white spores (a powdery mildew) underneath. This fungus spreads quickly through the plant to the stem and can travel to other plants by way of the wind.
Early blight tends to show circular target spot lesions. Plants with early blight have yellowing leaves with brown edges. Farmers can easily pluck these leaves and plants are mostly unaffected by early blight.
Spear said the wet weather in June and July not only provided good conditions for the late blight spores to populate, but also reduced the harvest in other plants. Spear said the yield in his farm’s bean crop was roughly 50 percent of what it should have been. He said all the water in the previous months washed out a lot of the nutrients in the soil.
Despite the drawback, workers on the farm planted a second crop of beans. Spear credits the farm’s new harvesting machine, which saves time and labor in picking, to expanded acreage of bean crops.
“I’ll have a lot of beans in the fall,” he said.
On the upside, their farm is one in Lincoln County that weathered the late blight storm this year and is fairing well despite a wet season early in the year. The farm has expanded from the couple acres of beans on which workers used to hand pick to 15 acres. They have other machinery, such as a shaker table, which weeds out beans that are too small.
They sell out of their vegetable stands in Nobleboro and Waldoboro, but also sell in bulk to supermarket chain stores such as Hannaford, Shaw’s and to Whole Foods supermarket in Portland.
