Who knew little Maggie liked lefse? Apparently she has Scandinavian genes just like her Mamom!

I can blog from my new phone!

This is Otter and he has a very big yawn.

I love old family photos like this. There are a ton more in hard copy, so I need to get around to scanning them and turning them into photo books for people. Other than the Apple iPhoto book program, are there book-making programs that you like?

Now:

Have you had any plant surprises lately? What did you do differently to your plants that you think caused it?

Libby warms up before the game and we get a pre-game pep talk by Coach Tim.

Lexie drew an awesome penalty here (about a second after this photo was taken, the girl in white ended up throwing her body under Lex and tripped Lex up.)

Laura, one of our assistant captains – and Angela, our pup of a goalie (she’s all of 19…)

I’m on my way to Denver for the Educause conference. Despite the bored look, I’m pretty excited about the free in-flight wifi. If you’re there, drop me a line. Trying to find folks who want to go see the Avs/Coyotes hockey game on Wednesday night, as well as trying to fit in some good food, good beer, and a trip or two to the local CrossFit affiliate, on top of going to and learning as much as I can while at the the conference.

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.