If you've missed any of Marvin's past columns, you can access them in the Weekly Wrapper Archive . Post your view to the Dear Marvin Forum. The premier tobacco of the Connecticut River Valley, which runs north through the upper half of Connecticut and into Massachusetts, is Connecticut shade. This year, just as the crop was nearing its peak, unusually cool and damp weather stormed through the valley. It left blue mold in its wake.
Blue mold is the bane of tobacco.
It's a fungus that can destroy an entire tobacco field in days if left unchecked, and every year it ruins acres of tobacco fields, especially in Central American tobacco countries such as Honduras and Nicaragua. Growers in Connecticut described this outbreak as small and manageable. We're comfortable that we have a very nice crop. In early August, the tobacco plants were about 10 feet tall, and workers had already removed the lowest rows of leaves, or primings, from the plants. This is the first step in a harvest that typically begins around the first week of July and continues until mid to late August.