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TOMATOES can be one of the easiest and most rewarding home crops. Besides thriving in the ground, they also love pots, hanging baskets and grow bags, producing loads of tasty fruits for salads, cooking and pizza sauce.

It is now the end of the tomato season in the UK and time to review the performance of this year鈥檚 crop. Sadly, my plants suffered badly from blight caused by a fungus-like organism called Phytophthora infestans. Many other people experienced the same issue 鈥� the first signs are sinister brown spots on leaves and fruit, which spread within days to destroy whole plants.

The pathogen drifts through the air as spores and germinates best on plants in the conditions of a rainy British summer, like the one we just had. Most tomatoes grown outdoors succumb to blight by the end of the season, in autumn, but this year my plants were showing signs of infection by early August, so I got only a few fruits before the rot set in.

Once blight reaches a plant, it can鈥檛 be saved, but you can take steps to reduce the chances of infection. To lessen humidity around the leaves, space out your young plants well, hold foliage up off the soil by tying it to supports and remove lower leaves as they age. Avoid splashing the leaves when you water, too.

Don鈥檛 allow plants to grow from last year鈥檚 fruit that fell on the ground, because they may harbour spores. (The same goes for potato plants, because this pathogen causes potato blight too.) And you can keep an eye on the 鈥�, which tells you if the disease is on its way based on local temperature and humidity, so you can pick any ripe fruits in the nick of time.

Most helpful of all is to choose tomato varieties that have some natural resistance to blight. I have previously been sceptical of this strategy after hearing of plants sold as blight-resistant that didn鈥檛 live up to their name.

But a newer variety called Crimson Crush seems to have exceptional disease resistance. It is the , according to the UK鈥檚 Royal Horticultural Society. There are now related Crimson varieties, available from several seed suppliers.

Another good strategy is to grow several tomato varieties, if you have room, because different ones can be resistant to different versions of the pathogen, says Katherine Steele at Bangor University, UK, who helped to develop Crimson Crush. 鈥淭here is a constant arms race between the pathogens and the plants.鈥�

I plan to try a few different Crimson plants next year as well as some old favourites. I would love to hear about readers鈥� experiences with these new varieties at .

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