Late Blight Strikes Tomatoes

This has been the rainiest summer I can remember. People keep joking "we're finally getting our summer" now that the temps have actually hit 90 degrees in the 2nd week of August. I recorded 8.66 inches of rain in July and it has continued to rain in August ( 2.68 inches as of 8/22/09 ) with Hurricane Bill sweeping by on Saturday.

All of that rain has brought a devastating Late Blight to most every farm & garden in the Northeast. I found an article on the NY Times website:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/dining/29toma.html


I've never seen such healthy tomato plants die off so quickly. These are the tomatoes that are on the outside of the greenhouse. They were green 7 days ago. All I tell myself is 'at least I'm not alone' -this is region wide devastation.
The only tomatoes that were not effected are inside the greenhouse.
Meanwhile...
The Sunflowers are just starting to open up as of August 22. Their lower leaves also seem to be effected by the rains. The photo below is pretty neat in my opinion, of a sunflower on the verge of opening.


This sunflower is an heirloom variety called Ling's Gray Stripe. I hope to save seeds to re-offer in the 2010 SSE yearbook.
One crop is doing great despite the blight; my Purple Broccoli is very happy!

I'm glad I planted a bunch of broccoli & cauliflower this year. Note to self: I need to plant at least 100 Cukes to pickle (I only did 30 plants this year)and I wish I had some yellow summer squash. Why I didn't get to it, I don't know-Silly mistake.

Now onto the orchard. The apples are doing great with the exception of I did not do a critical organic spray during the silver-tip stage in early spring. In fact, with all the rain basically occurring every 2 days, I did not spray at all.

So these apples will be true organic with absolutely no spraying in 2009. Talk about old school.

The blight was bad, but I still managed to get a few tomato varieties saved for seed. They are in the fermentation stage as I type this. Next entry will show photos of this years start of tomato seed saving.

:)