High & Dry Farm

Blight, a fungus disease that thrives under cool damp conditions, has just appeared on a few of my tomato plants.  Blight is the bane of Puget Sound tomato gardeners.  Based on past experience, I know that this infection will quickly spread among all the plants, so it is likely that I can expect only another week or so of tomato harvests. Blight spores carry over from year to the next in the soil, so limiting the exposure of plants to the soil, by growing tomatoes with black plastic film mulch, will delay infection.  This effect is very clear in my present garden, as the blight has appeared first on tomato vines that have wandered from the plastic-covered area onto the adjacent bare ground. Pulling out the infected plants as soon as the infection becomes apparent may slow the rate of spread a little, but nothing will stop the infection once it appears in the garden.  Sadly, tomatoes picked green from infected plants will themselves turn black from blight and rot, before they ripen.

Camp Joy is late for a cherry tomato, but it is very productive on riotous plants.

Bloody Butcher ripened early, with a moderately productive crop of golf ball sized fruit.

In this unusually cold summer, Marmande was the most successful of all 60 tomato varieties I planted.  It is very early and extremely productive.

Debarao is advertised as an early-ripening paste variety.

2014  However, in this unusually cool summer, Debarao set an incredibly large crop of fruit, but virtually none ripened.  In contrast, I did get a few ripe fruit from other paste varieties such as San Marzano.

2015 – Aug.8 7′ vine with 30 fruit and half of these are reipe.

This cherry-size tomato is a gorgeous addition to salads.

Despite the cruddy weather, a decent crop of tomatoes is finally coming.  Here is a classic sauce tomato – costuoluto genovese.

OK, not entirely new.  Here is the ~1925 Minneapolis Moline horse-drawn manure spreader that I purchased recently.  After a little face-lift (rust removal, painting, pumping grease into a gazzilion lube nipples) it works like the day it was born.  Until I get a couple of our horses trained to pull, I will be running this behind my Kubota.