Meanderings

Four year old buckwheat seed still a hearty sprouter in this year's garlic field. A fast-growing cover crop, it is now tilled in.

My neighbor's giant pumpkin patch: all those leaves to support one pumpkin.

My tray seeded royal catchfly, Silene regia, finally flowers, weakly, in its first year.

Eastern tiger swallowtail grabbing a drink from a rain filled cell tray.

A frog poking its head out of the same. 

The tomato patch, post tomato. One plant has retained a healthy posture, but continues to blight its fruit. The plants directly to the right are peppers, unaffected by the blight. The container near the hydrangea are potatoes that have somehow, to date, resisted succumbing. I pulled all the plants, anyway, leaving the tubers in the ground for my picking as needed. The tomato plants filled three 45 gallon trash bags.

The very green Eastern gray tree frog, notably Hyla versicolor, on its spiked throne.

Infestans

Had you asked me one week ago, before my excursion to New York City, about my tomatoes, I would have told you how wonderful they look, not a blemish, not a spot, so much growth if but a little slow to produce. The weather had been perfect -mid eighties daily, mid sixties nightly, occasional rains, some quite heavy, but spaced well enough to dry the soil and leaves consistently.

But you did not ask me a week ago, you asked me today, after temperature and moisture have acted in concert to produce a bloom of quick death, the ebola of tomatoes, a harshly sudden and lethal affliction with the curious botanic moniker P. infestans, late blight.

We can only watch as the plant withers, top and bottom, leaves, stems and fruit. Picking from this blackened tangle of vines is like stealing from the dead; the experience of tomato too close to mush and slime, one picked from this vine makes an appetite for it tarnished, rotten.  

It will be only a matter of days, maybe by this weekend, that the once strong will be blackened and slumped. I will watch them die and think about what little control we have over life, the one we wish for and the life we wish away.

The tomato patch after severe cleaning.

Pulping

My favorite heirloom Roma (speckled Roman, above), have been pulped in the sloppy strainer contraption I bought several years ago. It's been a terrible year for tomatoes, so humid and damp that blight set in well over a month ago. It's been a very good year for green beans and potatoes, broccoli and basil. The fall cauliflower and Brussels are floating giant leaves but no sign of anything edible yet. 

Soon we leave for a weekend in Milwaukee to hang an exhibit. I'll be showing photographs, a first. I'll post the information when it's all set up. In the meantime, check out my Instagram feed (you can find it here), from which I've harvested, maybe even pulped, the exhibit's images. 

Garden Report

Potatoes are waning but they're still impinging on the herb bed. As the sun lowers and the potatoes die down, the herbs should reclaim their full sun. In the back left, really tall milkweed.

As the garlic comes out over the last few weeks, the fall brassicas have been filling in. These are brussel sprouts, the first planted, into the space previously occupied by garlic 'Xian.' I've never grown these before, but have planned it for years. Notable this season is a lack of cabbage moths -not complaining!

 

Eggplant fruit coming on now.

Green beans, from purple to roma, prolific and easy as ever.

All peppers are fruiting, some large. Only difficulty is that the plants can hardly hold their large fruit and that I shouldn't be so lazy as to try to break a pepper off the plant instead of going for the pruner. What happens? Well, I break the whole pepper plant in half.

In complete opposite of last year, all our tomatoes are suffering blight. Could have come in on our purchased compost, or maybe because we planted in last years potato and eggplant beds. Hard to avoid poor rotation in a compact garden. Next year I think these beds will be garlic and the garlic beds will be tomatoes. All that can be done now is watch the tomatoes try to outgrow the blight.

More brassica as the Porcelain garlic 'Music' has come out. As two more varieties of garlic are harvested over the weekend, even more brassica will go in. Above is kale started from seed in the greenhouse.

And we've finally started digging into the soil for new potatoes. Above: Kennebec russet, Pontiac, and Yukon Gold. Thanks to the quantity of compost and straw they came out with little soil and easy to clean.


These giant pompoms, hydrangea actually, were moved from the south side of the house last year. We planted them in a great arc around the curving lawn-driveway. They are quite garish, but they keep the plow truck and other skiddish drivers from driving over the lawn and garden in summer and winter (thanks to the long lasting dried flower sepals), and maybe they keep the deer at bay. Maybe.

I've been very busy with many things, from door and sill replacement, old deck removal, job searching and applications, studio building projects, contractors and everything I can't stand about some of them, photographing, studio painting, my class Landscape into Art which runs on the twenty third of July, a bit of socializing, gallery going, and even a music festival in a corn field last weekend. Blogging has had to take a back seat to all this (as well as taking quality photos for them), but rest assured -I was able to plant half of my milkweed over the septic drain field and beyond yesterday. Progress.