Looking for suggestions. Any ideas welcome.
How many years can I plant tomatoes in the same soil?
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We don’t use the same ground more than 2 years, then move to a new spot. This helps reduce diseases and pest establishment. One tip: if you plant potatoes, be sure to get certified stock. Otherwise you run an almost certain risk of transferring blight to your tomato plants. Potatoes that have been ‘saved’ from kitchen stock are notorious blight vectors.
Where does the blight come from? Are potato farmers' fields full of blight? Seems like they wouldn't last very long as potato farmers if that were the case.
Blight or Late blight - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytophthora_infestans
Early Blight - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternaria_solani
Both need moist environments and the former, water-saturated or nearly saturated environments and the latter, humidity and wet leaves.
Air conditioned grocery stores and homes are dry so I can't see those places being loaded with blight spores.
There seems to be a 50/50 split in people that say store bought potatoes are fine to plant and people saying you shouldn't plant them. Some people say they are sprayed with something to keep them from sprouting but all the ones I've bought will sprout.
I've always bought seed potatoes from the grocery store. Since grocery stores are a place you can purchase seed potatoes, that kind of rules out it being a source for blight. My little grocery store keeps the seed potatoes 10 foot away from the eating potatoes. Seems like they'd come in the same trucks too because I doubt there are special trucks delivering seed potatoes out here in the boonies.
Reading the two wiki pages, it seems like the spores have a hard time living when conditions aren't ideal, mostly in the wet soil or on the wet foliage or tubers in the soil or culls piled up on the soil. The spores can travel with the wind for a time. Dry and/or warm conditions will kill them, however one of them can stay with the tuber and make it rot later. Which all brings me back to potato farmers' fields being loaded with blight in which case, they'd not be farmers for very long.
Reading up on them makes me think about something else. They say to dig taters when the soil is dry but one year I pulled plants up taters and all while the soil was moist and that was a lot easier than digging heavy, dry soil. Maybe they say to dig dry to prevent you from bringing blight into your root cellar which is cool and moist, ideal conditions for blight to survive.