Cockroaches! / the arrival of Tomato Blight?

 (The midnight cockroach...)

I was out at the garden at night, and saw a few cockroaches foraging through the leaf-litter mulch. Normally cockroaches freak people out, but it is quite a mark of success to have them crawling over your mulch - it means you have made a habitat so inviting for them they are leaving the house* and coming over, back to pseudo-nature.

The plant on which it is walking is a New Zealand spinach incidentally.

Some bad news - it seems I have incurred a case of some sort of Tomato Blight - the leaves are yellowing and dying from the bottom up. It has even affected the best of the tomato plants. More later on it as I try and figure out exactly what has gone wrong. At the moment I am thinking it is more like Tomato Bronchitis than Tomato Cancer, and hopefully it should be able to be coped with, rather than terminal.

(* - I dont have a cockroach problem, but my neighbours on the ground floor do. A secret for minimizing their presence - keep your kitchen clean, but more importantly, do not bring any cardboard boxes, especially those that have has foodstuffs in them, into the house. Open, cut  up and dispose outside. Cardboard boxes are the luxury jets for a cockroach - they get into them, lay a few eggs, and perhaps sit in the grooves, awaiting transport to the cockroach equivalent of a tropical island - ie your house and kitchen. Once the lights are out, the cockroaches will creep out and start enjoying their new life in your kitchen and living areas.

So keep the cardboard out, and you stop continually restocking the living areas with them.)