Bee in the Butterfly Bush

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.

The Great Late Blight of 2009

This year I planted 19 tomato plants in our garden. Six of them were from the local nursery and the other 13 I started from seed. I’ve been looking forward to a huge harvest for months now, and was really excited when the fruit started ripening a couple of weeks ago.

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.

The Yard Keeps Growing

What an amazing yard we’ve got! While Amy has done a TON of work on it the past two years, it had good bones to start, including a load of perennials in beds all over the place. My mom has asked for a bit of a tour (rather than all the close-ups) of the yard, so without further ado…

The side of our house – Vegetable garden in side yard

Back left side of yard – Back left corner of yard

Left side of yard is hosta heaven – Roses on trellis

Perennial garden in right side of backyard

More pictures are also available over at Flickr. If you’re so inclined, you can also watch the 3-minute tour of our yard below. It’s not super-exciting, but should place a lot of the above photos in context.

The Yard from librarygrrrl on Vimeo.