DIE TOMATOES DIE!!!

It' been a long, hot summer...not much of a year for gardening. The biggest surprise for me came from the mass die-off of my tomato plants -- all varieties. At first, the attack looked like red spider mites but the plants did not respond to the normal treatments. The plants continued to turn white with a moldy, fuzzy stuff on many of the stems. I was stumped as to the cause until I read an article about how home gardeners across the country were losing their tomato plants to a very contagious disease - the same disease that caused the potato famine. While it doesn't harm humans, it is to tomatoes what the plague is to us...deadly! Most of the press that I read tracked the source of the disease to Bonnie Farms, a nationwide chain of growers that service the big box stores such as Walmart and Lowes. I got the disease from a last minute purchase of Celebrity tomatoes from Walmart and it spread like wildfire to all my tomato plants (and egg plants too) in very little time. To me, it's another example of the failure of factory farming. I will never mix purchased plants with my own home-grown starts again.