Garden Losses

I’m in mourning. It’s OK. I didn’t lose a close friend, family member, or even a beloved pet. No, I’m mourning the total loss of my tomato crop to late blight.

I didn’t plant many tomatoes last year because I still had so many cans of sauce and whole tomatoes in juice left from the year before. But as the spring approached and my shelves grew bare, I looked forward to a summer of harvesting and processing my own tomatoes. I got seeds for 10 varieties of open pollinated paste tomatoes (I hoped to compare and see which produced best), planted them in late winter, and lovingly tended them under lights in my basement. I was late getting them in the ground because the area of the garden I wanted to put them in needed to be dug into beds, but once they were in, they took off like gang-busters. The plants were loaded with fruit, but since I knew they were nowhere near ripening, after I had weeded and mulched, I didn’t visit that area much lately. When I finally did...whoa (or should I say woe). Under the pretty green tops of the plants, which is what was most visible from the rest of the garden, the leaves and stems and most of the fruit had the tell-tale brownish-grey blots all over the. Yuck! And Yikes!

No canning of the rich, red sauce I use in so many recipes. No cans of whole tomatoes to dump into chili all winter. No salsa that I was growing onions, peppers, and cilantro for.

What’s worse, it wasn’t my only crop failure this year. Like so many neighbors, I got no tree fruit due to the early warmth followed by the late freeze. After barely getting enough cucumbers for 2 batches of pickles, the vines succumbed to wilt. I fought the squash borer for my costata romanesca...and lost. My procrastinating ways served me well in one area: my winter squash went in after, it seems, the wasp responsible for the borer grub had quit reproducing for the year. Assuming they have time to ripen, I should have a nice crop of squash to eat over the winter.

Now this brings me to a question I’ve been asking myself: how should I deal with these crop losses (I mean, aside from preparing to be way more proactive next year!)? I could buy produce from local vendors to can, and have already done so with cucumbers for the pickles that Pat likes on his sandwiches. I could stock up on the salsa I like even better than my own, from Pipers Peck. Or I could practice dealing with the situation as I would have to in a world where we can’t get everything from all over the world when we want it. I could change my menus to take advantage of what I was able to grow. Interestingly, my potatoes never showed a sign of the blight, but then I got them in nice and early, so I’ll have a good harvest there. My dried beans are doing well, which, when combined with the big winter squash, the potatoes, and the eggs from my chickens and ducks, are all I would really need to subsist (augmented with greens I can still grow).

It will probably be a combination. I will buy a few bushels of tomatoes from local folk to can and a few jars of salsa from Pipers Peck (well, more than a few probably), since that helps the local economy as well as my pantry. But it won’t be near enough to cover what I’m used to using in a year. And instead of buying Progresso or whatever in the grocery store, I will work to expand my repertoire of recipes. uh, know any good bean-potato-squash-egg casserole recipes?

Julie

August Garden Update

Check out the photos of our Market table from August 4! I thought it was so colorful, and Kristen Hoy, who was staffing the table for Buy Fresh, Buy Local, obligingly took some pictures of it for me before the Market got under way.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been harvesting gorgeous carrots that vary from white to yellow to orange to red, as well as bunches of the three types of beets we planted (my personal favorite, the golden, plus Crosby Egyptian red and Chioggias, which are the ones with the red and pink rings. Unfortunately, I forgot that one patch of the root vegetable row was planted with golden globe turnips that needed to be harvest small, and next thing I saw, we had softball-size turnips that were too woody to eat.

Speaking of forgetting, I didn’t remember planting a costata romanesca zucchini among the winter squash, and had to harvest clubs instead of the nice, medium-size squashes we usually get. I probably wouldn’t have seen them even then except it looks like we have again lost our winter squash plantings. Last year, it was to squash bugs; this year the vine borer. When I think back to the amazing, enormous harvest of butternuts, acorns and sweet dumplings we got in 2010, I wondered what we had done differently, but then I read that borers don’t like the solid stems of butternut squash. That same article (in Gardens Alive!: http://www.gardensalive.com/article.asp?ai=804) had lots of tips on preventing the grubs, so next year should be better. I suppose that’s what a Learning Garden is all about: getting a little better each year as we acquire skills!

The beans (purple, green, and yellow wax) took a bit of a break, but are back to producing like gangbusters now that we’ve had some rain and temperatures have moderated. I also pull a few red and yellow onions each week.

We harvested out first Rosita eggplant this week (Aug. 11) and have many more to come. We again used the silver reflecting mulch to keep the flea beetles at bay long enough for the plants to get big enough to withstand their attentions. But we also planted wormwood in the herb garden so that in future years, when we’ve used up what was left of the mulch we bought for our flea beetle trials, we can use a more sustainable deterrent.

The tomatoes are ripening now. However, the weekly attention that the trellising required did not happen, so we have quite the sprawling mound of vines to hunt through. Next to them, the peppers continue to produce very well. The purples are gorgeous every week, and we got our first long sweet red pepper, but I’m still waiting for the orange bells to turn from green, and for some of the jalapenos to ripen to red. Those red peppers are an open-pollinated variety I chose trying to find a pepper as sweet and prolific as the hybrid Carmen. They certainly are sweet, so I may have succeeded.

It’s funny how colored vegetables either attract buyers or make them hesitate. We grew red, white and blue potatoes this year, with both the red and blue ones having colored flesh as well as the skin. I thought they were so cool, so I was surprised that they didn’t sell better the first week. The next week, I boiled a couple of each and had them sitting out for folks to try. Once they got a taste of the tender, waxy spuds, I had to go back out to the garden half a dozen times to dig more!

I’d better check the corn this week. We planted an open pollinated variety called Black Aztec that is said to be good sweet corn. Brian Burger was on a quest to find a good non-hybrid sweet corn, so I thought we’d try it. And if it isn’t good "green," Black Aztec ripens into a dry corn that makes a good blue cornmeal.

We’ll be planting again this week, for the fall harvest of lettuce and radishes. We have seeds for about 6 varieties of radish, so that should be fun. And, speaking of fall, I’m still hoping the Brussels sprouts finish up strong. The loose loam soil of the Learning Garden, desirable in almost all circumstances, is a bit too loose for the good formation of Brussels sprouts.

Next report will be of the burgeoning herb garden. Until then,

Buy It Locally Grown

    Or Raise Your Own!

Julie