If you’ve been keeping up with the news in the northeast of the US, you know that a fungus called “late blight” (or “early late blight”) has decimated the tomato crop here. This Op-Ed piece by Dan Barber in the New York Times brought it all home for me: Stone Barnes lost more than half of its tomato crop! In Manhattan, it’s nearly impossible to find decent tomatoes this summer. I’m incredibly bummed about it because I so look forward to the delicious juicy tomatoes that appear in the markets every summer. But this year? This year, all I’m seeing is crumbly-textured hothouse tomatoes that don’t live up to their names. It’s depressing!
The picture above is of the single tomato I managed to grow on my windowsill this summer. My apartment doesn’t get enough light to really grow food in the windowsill anyway, but this year especially (with all the rain), there was no chance anything was going to grow well. My basil plant has looked half-dead all summer, too. Of course my tomato doesn’t have the blight, but it easily could have gotten it.
I’ve been going to various stores and farmer’s markets looking for decent tomatoes but keep coming up empty. The fungus has hit heirloom tomatoes the hardest, so the most interesting ones we all look forward to in the summer are the ones that are the hardest to find. A new Whole Foods opened 2 days ago just a block from my apartment and I went on opening day, specifically looking for good tomatoes. There was a huge stack of heirlooms in a corner, but upon closer inspection I saw they looked absolutely awful: there were black spots and marks on all of them. I was afraid to spend all the money only to cut into a tomato full of black inside, so I came home empty-handed. Again.
If you do a Twitter search for “tomato blight,” you’ll see lots of horrible tweets as backyard gardeners recognize the problem and pull up their entire harvest.
Today’s dreary rainy weather feels like the first day of fall and it just hit me: I’m really not going to get any good tomatoes this year. It’s enough to make a girl daydream about taking a weekend trip to the west coast to spend a few days gorging on unaffected tomatoes.
Actually that sounds like a pretty good idea . . .
Other articles about the tomato blight:
Apparently there are fears that it’s spreading west now, too: Indiana has it.
Sigh.
