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.