ALERT! Corrales Tomato Growers:
Desert Broomrape in the Village
Seed2Need, a Corrales non-profit that grows tomatoes and other vegetables for donation to local food pantries, has encountered a parasitic weed with purple flowers that attaches itself to the roots of tomato plants, eventually killing the host plant by depriving it of nutrients.
The Agricultural Extension Service at NMSU has identified the weed as a species of broomrape, most likely Desert Broomrape, a native to the Southwest. The only crop vegetable it is known to kill is tomato. A single broomrape seedling quickly grows beneath the tomato plant, producing up to 500,000 microscopic wind-dispersed seeds that can survive in soil 35 years.
Every tomato plant in a large Seed2Need garden was affected in July. We believe that broomrape arrived in the garden in 2022, subsequently producing seeds that were tilled into the soil in the early spring of 2023. Measures are being taken to kill every broomrape and tomato plant in the affected patch.
We are sharing this information because broomrape may be growing in other tomato patches in Corrales. For more information, see the following articles:
https://www.plantsciences.ucdavis.edu/news/broomrape-eradication-high-priority-uc-researchers
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2016.00135/full
https://wssa.net/wp-content/themes/WSSA/WorldOfWeeds/orobanche.html
https://www.infonet-biovision.org/PlantHealth/Pests/broomrape
https://www.invasive.org/weedcd/pdfs/wow/small-broomrape.pdf
If you find broomrape in your tomato patch, please report it to the Master Gardeners helpline at emailhelpline [at] sandovalmastergardeners.org (emailhelpline[at]sandovalmastergardeners[dot]org)