Amy whacked the butterfly bush back a couple of years ago. I was afraid it would never recover. I needn’t have fretted. This fellow is happy it came back too.

Then we went to Maine for a long weekend. When we came back, I found that about half the plants had the late blight. And so I had to pull all of them out of the ground and put them in a trash bag. I’m not quite sure what to do to the soil to make it okay for tomatoes again next year – it’s still a little too raw for that.

Not sure what the late blight is? Well, it’s the disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine. It’s a bugger to get rid of, particularly if you want to use organic methods. It can take out the entire crop in a few days, which is why I pulled mine out. It’s a fungal disease, and it’s airborne. I pulled all mine out also because I don’t want to infect my neighbors (although it’s likely too late for that).

The late blight has been a horrible problem in the northeast this year. The trifecta of lots of rain, cool temperatures, and a whole slew of infected plants that got shipped from southern growers to big-box stores (and sold) made ideal conditions for this to thrive. Not only did I lose my 19 plants (sob!) but my CSA lost their entire crop of tomatoes. As in, none of the 300+ CSA shares get tomatoes this year. This is the same CSA that gave out 10+ pounds to each shareholder multiple times last summer. Devastating.

Not sure if you have the blight? Check out these great resources, and if you DO have it, bite the bullet, pull up the plants, and trash them. Don’t compost them. Trash them. It sucks, but better to get rid of it now than continue to infect your neighbors and farmers.

Our tomato plants – all 19 of them (plus 2 sunflowers).

Dying stalks and leaves.

Telltale browning/blackening of the stems.

About 2/3 of the harvest (at least the tomatoes didn’t succumb, but now HOLY CRAP we have a lot of green tomatoes.)

Bagged, ready to be tied and trashed.

So sad….

This is the hand that planted the tomatoes, and it’s the hand that pulled them up.

Johnny Jump-Up
(not to be confused with the Jossi Jukin-Up)
(only you hockey fans will get that one).

More bleeding hearts, because I love them.

Purty tulip guts.

One of the new tulips this year, in the spot where the arborvitae used to live.

We’ve also got some wildlife in the yard:

There are at least 2 garter snakes – one near the veggie garden and one near the neighbor’s pool. Here is PoolSnake sunning itself. I watched VeggieSnake eat a worm the other day. Holy circle of life Batman. !!!

Speaking of circle of life, here’s Maggie chowing down on the incredibly long grass, which we’ve already mowed three times this year. Before May 18. !!!

And here’s Maggie letting us all know that the mailman is trying to violate the integrity of the yard. It’s really too bad the mailman leaves every day, because she thinks it’s because she barks at him. Alas, silly dogs won’t be reasoned with.

April 2009 – with small dog and new color (which highlights the weird lack-of-trim around the kitchen windows – gotta get on that)

Mid-June 2008 – with mown grass, pre-painting (way too many power and cable lines coming to the house – we got rid of 2 of them and we’ve also since cut down the gigantic arborvitae to the right of the house and two large ash trees to the left of the house (sob! except that they could have fallen on the house or a neighbor’s house in a heavy storm so it’s safer we cut them down now.))

May 2008 – with flowering quince and tulips

May 2007 – with tulips

June 2006 – with wheelbarrow

March 2006 – with open cellar door

Yellow and white (daffodils and tulips)

Purple and blue

And some of my favorites, the white bleeding hearts

There are more flowering now – many more tulips, the pink bleeding hearts, the invasive bamboo, the invasive pig’s wort (not likely to give us flu, I’ll have you know), and the invasive bishop’s weed. I love the flowers but the weeds? I could totally do without those.

After several weeks of me pissing and moaning about this, Amy finally threw up her hands and said, “Fine! Let’s go get a tree!” We talked a bit and decided on either a red or sugar maple. So last Sunday, we headed out to one of the big local nurseries. Alas, they didn’t have any trees onsite. We headed down to the local nursery that’s a lot closer to us (but doesn’t have the same widespread reputation) and hit paydirt (literally – everything was 25% off, so we got to buy a more mature/expensive tree!) They had several types of both red and sugar maples on-site. After an hour of thinking and debating, we decided on a lovely little Green Mountain Sugar Maple. It won’t get as big as either of the ash trees, but I think it’s going to be simply beautiful. Here it is being delivered and planted.

And here it is, looking towards the back of the yard and then towards our house.

Why yes, I do love it! It’s going to take many years to get a lot bigger, and I can’t wait to see it grow.

• Holly and Libby finished scraping and priming two of the three other side of the house that still needed scraping.
• I painted most of the south side of the house and about half of the front of the house.
• I picked veggies at the farm, including 10 pounds of tomatoes!
• And Clark trimmed and removed about 7 or 8 smallish diameter trees, a couple larger trees that were overhanging the neighbor’s pool, and the big arborvitae that was trying to take over the northeast corner of our house.

Yeah, as you can probably tell, Amy’s sister and her husband came down Saturday and Clark went to town with his chainsaw. He actually came back today and finished up all the stuff he couldn’t get to yesterday. While I know we needed to do a lot of this trimming and tree removal, it still pained me. What pains me more is that we’ve got two HUGE other trees that need to come down behind the garage because they’re dying and dropping branches. Yowza. It’s gonna be nekkid back there!

Photos eventually – I’m too pooped to pull out the camera cable…

Either we are too particular or this is a lot harder work than we anticipated. I’m going to go with a healthy dose of both those things.

Remind me again why we decided to paint the outside of our house. It’s a time vortex.

To keep you entertained for a moment, here’s a macro of a lovely hydrangea in our yard during a respite in a big storm:

And here is a sailboat from when we were up in Acadia National Park. It’s the Helen Brooks, a Friendship Sloop owned and chartered by Amy’s brother Karl.

Until such time as I blog again, ta!