| Re: blight in the soil
Growing potatoes or tomatoes in pots won't insure you against blight, as it can blow in from anywhere if the conditons are right for it. For instance from a neighbouring allotment. If your neighbours are like mine, they all grow potatoes.
The best advice I've found is to grow potatoes that mature early and hope you can harvest them before the blight arrives. Outdoor tomatoes are always going to be hit and miss - we have had three excellent years (growing in pots) and then this year some of the tomatoes got blight - likely a result of the damp summer we had.
I've not been able to find anything authoritative that suggests exactly how long it could remain dormant in the soil. The nearest I could find was "more than 2 years" - I think that blight is so endemic that it's difficult to know in each case whether it arises from spores in the soil or wind-blown spores. |