Late (Breaking) Blight

The late season killer!

I love this time of year.  You know - when all the super hard work and dedication to the garden really pays off in spades.  When the crown jewel in many gardens - the tomato - comes on its strongest, flooding kitchens and cans with a seemingly endless red tide of homegrown goodness.

Ahem.

Yeah.

Not so much in this sloppy, cold, wet mess of a summer.  And the tomatoes paid the final ultimate price.

After we rescued them from floods time and time again this Spring, we thought we were onto something.  The tomatoes seemed to come back wit ha vengeance.  And the early stress yielded us some very early fruits that had fairly decent flavor.  Yup, we thought we were on the fast path to a bumper crop of tomatoes that we proudly saved from the brink.

Where the tomatoes were

Yeah, umm, not so much.

Instead - we got hit by the blight really - really hard!  And like everyone else that has experienced this fierce fungal foe this year - there's nothing you can really do but watch your harvest turn to mush on the vine.

So - this last weekend we did the unthinkable.  We pull them all from the ground, cleaned up the tomato cages for another year and called the game on account of fungal infestation.  It was heartbreaking.

However - the silver lining was the methods used to dispose of the infested vines with...  FIRE.  And there's something satisfying about watching billions and billions of fungal spores you can't "really" see - going up in smoke and becoming the same ashen memory they turned this years harvest into.

Enjoy the late blight bonfire here.

Comments

[Elcoj]

Greatings, www.chickenthistlefarm.com - da best. Keep it going!
Elcoj