After a rough start, southwestern Ontario's tobacco crop is back on track. The Victoria Day weekend, normally synonymous with sun, fun and the start of the tobacco season, was plagued by hard frost and below-zero temperatures that left some growerswith plant damage. Though some farmers had started planting when the frost struck, and ended up with varying degrees of cold injury, Dan Ramer, tobacco specialist with the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, said frost damage wasn't confined to plants in the field. "We've been bombarded with calls about frost damage in greenhouses," he said. "I can remember it being cool but I can't ever remember it being consistently below zero .... And I've never seen this severity in the greenhouses." Plants along the outer edges of green-houses sustained the most severe damage, said Ramer, which consisted of leaf discolouration, wilting, and in some cases black- or white-coloured growing points. To prevent disease, Ramer said growers were advised to pull badly damaged plants and start again.
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