Blossom End Rot

We've had a huge issue with Blossom End Rot on the tomatoes in the garden.  The tomato will just keep rotting from the bottom end (where the blossom is), so I've had to pick them all off.    I did hours of research and checking out other people's solutions.   There are a ton of them, and as always when searching the 'net for info, you have to take some of the answers with a grain of salt.

This condition is caused by a lack of calcium. I read about all sorts of solutions to this issue, which included watering the plants with powdered milk, adding calcium antacids, ground egg shells,  calcium chloride waterings, purchasing a box of some sort of remedy, and watering with epsom salts in water.   There were more and some were pretty bizarre.   Here's the thing though, all these solutions were on pages which said, I had this issue and this is what I did, and hopefully it will work.  None of them talked about why the condition happens or said if they were successful in treating it.    I almost tried the epsom salts as I had some in the cupboard.  I didn't though because there is no calcium in epsom salts.  Instead, I kept reading.

Finally I came to an easy to read article from some Ag. department at a U.S. university.  It stated that the issue is not generally a lack of calcium in the soil, but stressing of the plants, which causes the available calcium to be used elsewhere in the plant.    They also explained that it tends to appear in years with a cool, wet spring, followed by some very hot, dry weather.   They also said that it generally fixes itself.   However, an easy fix was to simply water the plants regularly to make sure they aren't being stressed.

It went on to explain that most calcium additions to the soil take weeks or months to break down and become usable, so they aren't generally the immediate solution to Blossom End Rot.   It also said that while many gardeners swear by the efficacy of epsom salts, there wasn't really hard, scientific evidence for this and a soil test would show whether more magnesium was required, which is what epsom salts adds to the soil.  I guess that magnesium might help with the calcium uptake.

After this, I put away the epsom salts (not really, it's still sitting here beside me), and took out my hose.  I've been watering the tomato plants, and cukes and pepper plant, because they are all susceptible to Blossom End Rot.   I've been giving them a lot of water and lo and behold, after only a couple of days, my tomatoes were growing rot free.   It really did happen that quickly.  

We've had only a couple of light rains, and since I've heavily mulched that part of the garden with a lot of straw.  The straw helps keep soil borne diseases from the plants, keeps the weeds down and mulches the soil to hold in moisture.  The problem is of course that the straw compacts and then that rain doesn't making it down to the soil, unless it's a heavy rain.  I've pushed away a bit of straw near the stems and am watering directly to the soil.     I'm thrilled with the simple solution.  Now, if only they will ripen about 3 or 4 canning jars full at a time!