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