Garden Disaster

We're back from an incredible trip to Glacier, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton National parks, plus some fabulous places in-between, and spending time with great friends. After we sort through hundreds of pictures, I'll pick some to post.

On the other hand, our garden didn't fair too well while we were gone. I'm sure there are many factors that played into the disaster. We made a special effort to mulch our plants well to keep the weeds down, keep moisture in, and for the garden to be low maintenance while we were gone. This must of back fired with all the rain. I knew the tomatoes had signs of blight that spreads quickly with a lot of moisture, so I also found an organic dust to use on the peppers and some tomatoes, which also may have caused damage instead of helping.?.

I went out this morning to begin assessing the damage and of course it started raining. I'll have to pull up all but 2 or 3 of the tomato plants. I haven't had a chance to see if the potatoes rotted and the peppers look like they could use some drying out as well. The corn and the sunflowers did love all the rain. Our second set of corn caught up to the first set and seems to look even taller. (Thanks, to Clay's mom for helping to harvest some of the corn while we were gone!) I picked a couple of cucumbers today that survived on a pitiful looking vine and I haven't ventured into our squash plants to see what is happening in there.

I'm sad about the tomatoes, especially since I grew so many of them from seed this year, but as I was pulling up the cages and plants I just thought this is one less chore I'll have later this fall when I'm trying to adjust to teaching a new grade and being at a new school. I also want have to stress about canning tomatoes or making salsa. We'll have a lot of thinking and reading to do before we plant next year. We may take a break from growing tomatoes or need to dig up a new plot for them in hopes that the soil is free from the blight causing spores.

Mid July

Just a few pictures before we leave for a two week trip in the mid west. I visited crows nest and picked 2 gallons of berries in less than 2 hours.
This is the first year we've seen blight like evidence on our pepper plants. The bottom leaves are turning spotty/brownish yellow and falling off. I did get an organic fungicide dust to use. It would have been best to have used it as a preventative measure, but I wasn't expecting to have problems with our peppers.
Butternut squash is coming in. This is the one squash plant that didn't look devastated early on by cucumber beetles and squash bugs, but they seem to be moving in and actually eating on the fruit not just the plant.
Our corn is still doing well, we hope to have some to eat when we get back!
One view from the entrance of the garden.
Little cabbage sprouts growing from the original cabbage plant, pretty cool, and they seem to be worm free for now.
Thanks Jessica, for all the pretty sunflower seeds. I love the shorter and smaller blooms that don't seem to get top heavy and fall over! This is such a lovely shade of yellow with the dark center!!! I think this is called Moonshadow.

Returning From the Beach

Clay and I just returned from a week's vacation to the Outer Banks in North Carolina. We had beautiful weather the whole week and warm, Caribbean blue water. We spent most of our time out on the beach getting toasty in the sun and cooling off in the water. Rick took some of us crabbing at the Roanoke Sound. We caught and released several small fellows. They had to be 5 in. across the shell to keep and we didn't net enough for dinner, but had fun trying. We also did some kayaking on the sound and on the ocean. We didn't have any spills this year and although I don't have and pictures, dad made it out in the ocean just in time to hang out with the dolphins swimming by. We went to Roanoke Island and toured the Elizabethan Gardens one morning. Minus the mosquitoes we were really impressed with the variety of plants and how well maintained the gardens were. Their most showy flowers were all of the Hydrangeas. We took several pictures that I may try to post at some point, but I thought this view of the boxwood edged flower beds, through the archway was a nice one.

Clay and I spent one day driving from Nags Head to the Hatteras Inlet and rode the ferry over to Ocracoke Island. We lucked out on the way back and caught a beautiful sunset from the ferry.

The garden was not too out of control when we returned, thanks to Clay's parents for checking on it for us a couple of times while we were gone. We had 5 large yellow squash to harvest, one zucchini (our poor zucchini plants are looking pitiful), and 10 cucumbers. The cucs are coming in great, but the plants look like they may not last long. We directly planted some seeds to have plants producing later in the season, but they didn't survive the long week of hot days with no rain. Although they don't exactly look very pretty in the picture, our best surprise when we got back, would be the potatoes. I was afraid that the potato beetles would take over while we were gone and they did a fine job trying (I probably picked off over 50 easily, I couldn't find any rubbing alcohol on hand so I used a cup with vinegar and it did the trick), but they didn't keep the potatoes from growing down below. We dug up one plant and found six tennis ball sized, red potatoes and a couple smaller ones. The roots still had several buds waiting to grow, so I think we will have a good crop to harvest later in the season.
Our last red cabbage was harvested while we were gone, I will have to try to plant those more spaced out next year to extend the season.
The corn silks are showing up, so we need to add some mineral oil to them asap, to help keep the worms out.
The tomato plants do have signs of the blight, but still look pretty good at this point. I've been trimming the bottom leaves that are looking spotty. There are tons of small green tomatoes, but I have noticed a few that appear to have the blossom end rot problem.
Peppers look ok - not a lot happening with them so far.
We have a ton of weeding to do tomorrow and some other general maintenance.