Using Fertilome For Blight

I decided to use an organic fungicide to help with the blight. It was taking over every plant it touched and Ryan and I didn't want it to go any further. We decided we would rather use a fungicide than lose all of our hard work to a stupid spore. I went to Jackson's Greenhouse and asked for help.

New growth on my 'Chef's Choice' orange
tomato plants that had lots of blight

You can see where the leaves died where
they were affected with blight

The lady there directed me to a product called Fertilome. She said it wasn't organic, but I did some research and the chemicals used in the product are considered organic. She kept telling me I had a bug problem from what she could see in my photos. But, I tried telling her I had talked to a few different people about it and I'd done a lot of research and she wouldn't listen. I finally showed her my original photo of the blight and she changed her tune and said maybe she was wrong. Duh.

Well, I bought the fungicide and a pH tool. I am going to take in a cup of soil for Jackson's to test for me since they do it for free. I thought free was better than spending $20 on the kit myself, but I haven't made it back because I've been busy. I have plans to take the soil in tomorrow and I will let you know what I find out.

The butternut squash is growing along the fence quickly

When I got home, I mixed up some of the fungicide with water as the bottle directed, then put it in a spray bottle. The directions say to lightly spray the affected leaves, but not so much that the leaves drip. I lightly misted all the affected plants, and tried not to breathe in the chemicals. Although they are organic chemicals, they are still chemicals and should be treated as such.

I sprayed three days ago. The photos here are taken today, three days after the application of the fungicide. I feel like it worked. The leaves that had blight on them are now brown and shriveled, as if the fungicide killed the blight, but also killed the leaf in the process. But, the stems don't seem to look any different and there is new growth on the top of the plants. Also, the blight hasn't spread like it had been before. Last week, before the Fertilome, I noticed entire branches overcome in only a day or two. Now, it's a spot here and there and mostly on the tips of the leaves. I feel like it's been a success so far, but still have to wait and see what happens.

Coriander hanging in the basement

I was scared of using the fungicide because I read online that some bugs would die as a result. Ugh, that was my biggest hesitation in using the fungicide, but I also read that it was only in the first 24 hours that it would kill bugs, so I tried to make it so when bees were out and around, it would be the last 12 hours of the 24. So, I sprayed it on around 6 p.m. when I hardly see any bees or other bugs around. Also, I've been out to the garden and there are still tons of insects buzzing around, so it must not have done too much damage. I'm not sure, and it's hard to tell. But it is something I think about and try to affect as little as possible. I read where you can cover your plants with a sheet or some other cover for 24 hours, then remove them.

The butternut squash and the musk melon plants are doing well. The butternut has vined out and we have 2-3 small squash and one big one so far. There are a bunch of flowers, too, so it must be doing well. The muskmelon is producing, too. We have at least two melons, one of them is a bit bigger than the other. That plant is growing up the fence, too, and there are many possibilities for fruit to appear. The lakota squash isn't doing much and neither is the zucchini. Hopefully, after we get the soil tested at Jackson's, we can get those turned around.

I went ahead and harvested the coriander. Some of it was still green and seems to be taking forever to turn brown. But, some of it is brown, so I decided to cut it all and hang it downstairs and see what happens. There is so much of it, I'm sure it will be ok if it all doesn't turn brown, but from the plants I hung last week, it seems like they will all eventually turn brown. 

Now that we have a blank spot in the garden, Ryan and I are going to save the spot for fall planting. We want to do more greens and lettuces. So for the time being, we are going to leave it alone. 

Once a week I've been feeding all of the plants in the garden the seaweed fertilizer Ryan bought at Jackson's. For some reason it was hard for us to find this stuff anywhere. It's available online, but hard to find in the stores and nonexistent at stores like Lowe's or Home Depot. All they have is Miracle Grow. There are all kinds of brands, but the one we are using is called Maxicrop Liquid Seaweed. I hear that fish emulsions work just as well. Our 'Tumbling Toms' plant on our front porch was looking pretty sad and had stopped producing any fruit. I poured this on it and by the next week there were three new branches with blooms on them. It's been almost three weeks since the first time I put any on it and I've gotten 3-4 tomatoes off of it and there are even more to come. I definitely recommend getting some of this if your garden seems a little puny. This is much better than Miracle Grow, and the results are immediate. It's a little pricey, but worth the price, I think. You add one ounce to a gallon of water and I did about an ounce between the two garden beds and a quart on the 'Tumbling Toms' and the rest of my flowers on the front porch. It works on those, too, in case you're wondering.

I plan to keep using the seaweed once a week and I may spray one more time for blight. I think after that, if I continue to water carefully, I won't have to worry about the blight. At least I hope.

Handy Dandy Dehydrator

Over the weekend, I've been messing around with a food dehydrator Ryan and I bought on Amazon. We discussed it for awhile and decided that we would have plenty of tomatoes to dry and other projects we'd like to try (dried fruit, beef jerky, fruit leather, etc.), and we felt it would be a worthwhile purchase. We spent about $65 for it with free shipping.

The dehydrator we bought is electric with a fan that runs. There aren't any settings on it because we decided on a basic model since we are beginners. Of course there are more expensive ones that let you play with settings like timers and temperature control. That would be nice, but those models cost more around $200 and we just weren't ready to spend that much. One thing I like about our model is that the trays can be stacked one way for a shallow drying surface for thinly cut foods, and stacked another way for thicker cut foods, you just flip it over. That way, you don't smash your food or give too much room either.

For the first round, I kept it simple with cherry tomatoes. Later, I added basil, which didn't take very

long at all.  I cut the tomatoes in half and placed them cut side up. The tomatoes weren't too juicy so I didn't have to worry about them dripping into the fan, which is something I have to watch out for on this particular model. I didn't treat the tomatoes with anything at all, I just stuck them into the dehydrator after slicing them and turned it on.

A little bit later, I added some fresh basil from the garden. The basil only took 45 minutes to an hour. It was quick and the smell was amazing. I just stood there and smelled it all for awhile and enjoyed the aroma. When the basil was dried, I found a container and crumbled the freshly dried herb into it. Ahh, it smelled so good! The freshest dried herbs you'll ever use are ones produced this way. I opened my store-bought basil and compared and it just didn't make the cut. The store-bought stuff was gross compared to what I had just made. It's hard not to throw it out, but it's gonna happen eventually I'm sure.

Dried cherry tomatoes

Yesterday, I found some somewhat old blueberries in the fridge. They weren't yet moldy, but they were just a little shriveled. I thought, 'what the heck' and threw them in the dehydrator. Why not? I left them in for about 11 hours and they were almost all the way dry, except for the bigger blueberries, they were like little pebbles. The bigger ones were a little more like raisin-consistency.

I also dried some herbs -- thyme, basil, pineapple sage and rosemary -- but I did those first so the flavor wouldn't leach out into the blueberries. That wouldn't be good.

Next, we want to try bananas, peaches and maybe even some kiwi.

Our Struggles With Blight

So the blight did not go away.

We had to sacrifice our 'Early Girl' plant and may have to get rid of the 'Chef's Choice' orange ones. It's very sad and depressing, really. I'm scared the rest of my plants are going to get infected so we started to make some hard decisions.

The stems on my pepper plants were turning black

Blight on my pepper plants' leaves

Ryan and I decided to also get rid of our bell pepper plants and jalapeno plants because they were overcome with blight, also. The stems were even starting to turn black, which I read HERE is sign of late blight, which is even harder to get rid of and can even kill your entire crop in a matter of days. That scared me, so I wanted to rip those out as soon as I could. It was a hard decision, but we felt like it was the best one.

I've been able to prune off the small bits of blight from all my other tomato plants, but I'm scared the 'Black From Tula' may be on its way out, but it has tons of fruit on it right now. I think tomorrow I'm going to check out Jackson's Greenhouse and talk to the people who work there and see if there is something I can do. I really want to keep the garden organic, but I've read about how there are organic solutions. I was not wanting to use any chemicals, but I guess I'm gonna have to if I want to save these plants.

One of my many harvests.

In order to keep the plants from touching so much, we've started to direct each plant's growth out, away from the other plants. Now that the pepper plants are gone, we have room to walk back into the garden and mess around with the plants. Next year, we definitely need to space things out a bit more so we can do that on a regular basis. Being able to view your plants from all angles is important. One I wish I would have been told before starting this endeavor.

Overall, I'm happy with the garden. If we can get this blight under control we should have plenty of tomatoes for canning, BLTs, salads and even some to share with family and friends. Every tomato I've tasted has been amazing, and I can't wait for more. Tonight, we just cut our first 'Black From Tula' and it was juicy, meaty and robust. The 'Early Girl' tomatoes have been sweet, but smaller than I'd hoped and packed full of flavor. The 'Sunpeach' has been one of my favorites. It's peach colored and sweet, meaty and bursting with juice.

A variety of tomatoes from the garden.

The couple zucchini we've picked are flavorful and the texture has been good. But, as you can see from the photo above, the ends are kind of withered and I found where it may be blossom end rot, which occurs because of calcium deficiency. There have been a couple other zucchini where the end was more mushy and looked like it was rotting off.

I have a bunch of eggshells so I'll probably go throw those on there to start off. But first I'm going to test my soil. While I'm at Jackson's I'll ask about a soil testing kit or meter. I found that Ace Hardware has one for $15.

I ordered a food dehydrator on Amazon last week and it should be here tomorrow. We plan to dry many of our cherry and grape tomatoes with it. We have plenty for a first batch this weekend. I'll post my experience here.

Garden Progress Mid-July

Everything is coming along nicely. I feel like the plants are much healthier after I removed the blight-filled leaves.

I did find that some sort of pest got to one of my "Black From Tulas". I looked up some possibilities, and found where it's probably a tomato hornworm. I tried looking under the leaves to find them, but couldn't. This was the same day I picked all of the leaves with blight, so maybe I was able to remove the worms, too? I hope so. I haven't seen any more holes in any other tomatoes, yet. I will keep checking.

Here are a couple more tomatoes on my "Black From Tula" plant. They look so good!

Here are some "Chef's Choice Orange" after pruning. 

Our Lakota squash is going crazy. It's found its way up our fence without much help. Ryan is trying to get the muskmelon to do the same thing in this photo. He also had to separate the Lakota squash from some of our tomato plants because the squash was just wrapping itself around the tomatoes. Next year we know to plant everything much further apart.

These are some "Sunpeach" cherry tomatoes. They are so sweet and juicy. We've been able to harvest a few of these here and there, but there are about to be hundreds.

The "Sunrise Bumblebee" is coming along nicely.

These are "Sweeties", another sweet cherry, but these will be bright red. As you can see, we are going to have hundreds of these, too.

The plant most affected by blight, the "Early Girls" are still coming along nicely. There are lots of fruit still hanging and starting to redden up a bit. I'm just hoping there will be new growth after these.

I spied this little guy while watering. I hadn't seen anything but blossoms on the zucchini plant.  There's another small one to the left of this one, but you can't see it in this picture, and it's much smaller. This one is the star of the show, at the moment. I can't wait to see how many more we get!

Taking Care of Blight

I chose the perfect day to prune my tomato plants. It's been 70 degrees and cloudy. I got lucky.

Next year I really need to remember to plant my crops further apart. I definitely didn't give any of them enough room to spread out and really grow. I have a squash plant wrapping itself around a tomato plant, and tomato plants intertwining so much I can't tell which plant is which. Not to mention, you can see the path of the blight.

Before

After reading up about blight, I've found that it takes touching leaves and lots of water to spread the spores quickly, and you could definitely tell by looking at my plants, the path the blight traveled.

I lost most of my "Early Girl" plant because it's in the back, I couldn't see it very well, and by the time I noticed the blight for what it was, it had spread through most of the plant. Luckily, the branches that held most of the ripening fruit weren't affected, but pretty much all of the other branches were sacrificed. Our "Early Girl" is now a Naked Girl. I think we should still be able to get the remaining fruit from the plant, but I'm not sure how much more it will produce. Hopefully I was able to save it and it will continue to produce a bunch of tomatoes.

Because the "Early Girl" is next to the "Black From Tula's" and the "Orange Chef's" Choice, those

After

two plants lost the second-most of all my plants. Also, the "Sweeties" needed some minor pruning at the base of the plant, and when I did that I found a bunch of fruit I didn't know was even there. As you can see from the photos, I took off a lot of leaves, but I didn't lose much fruit. There is still some low-hanging fruit on the "Sweeties" so I left them there. Also, this plant only had minor blight, and I mulched heavily in hopes to prevent future blight outbreaks. If that fruit wasn't there, I would have cut all of that off at the base and probably still will once those tomatoes are ready to pick.

I went ahead and pruned my other tomato plants in the other garden bed to the south. There were minor signs of blight, but nothing like the north bed, but I still wanted to prune to prevent any blight from happening in the future. I went up about a foot of the plant, trying to think about how water splashes when I water. I also mulched that bed heavily, making sure to spread the straw away from the base of the plant a bit to prevent rot or pest from showing up.

The future plan is to get some soaker hoses set up and get them connected to our rain barrels. That's going to take some work, though, so it probably won't happen tomorrow. Soon, though.

Early Blight -- OH NO!

Over the weekend I found that some of my tomato plants have early blight. At first I was stressing out about it, then I did some reading and found that it's a common problem that can be fixed pretty easily.

Infected leaf on my Early Girl plant

First, I took a photo of one of the leaves affected on my Early Girl plant. Then, I posted it to Facebook to see what others had to say.

After doing some more research online and listening to what people were saying on Facebook, I came to the conclusion that I'm dealing with early blight. Early blight is a fungal infection that is easily spread by water or touching leaves. The spores use water to travel, so when you water they splash up and land on the bottom leaves of your tomato plants. The spores move up from there, infecting your plant one leaf at a time, including jumping to other plants if their leaves touch.

Unfortunately, I planted my tomato plants way too close together, so airflow is at a minimum and the leaves will stay wet longer, so I need to take extra care when watering in the future. Also, I hope to get some soaker hoses set up, that way splashing won't be an issue anymore. Then, next year, I won't plant my tomatoes in the same spot, as that will encourage blight to return, and I'll make sure to spread them out more than I did this time.

My plan of action includes pruning off infected leaves, mulching heavily with straw and adding soaker hoses so I can limit splashing. I think I'm going to prune all of my plants about a foot off the ground. Maybe closer, I'll judge that when I'm out there and let you know what I decide.

Some articles I read promoted the use of fungicides but I hope to fix the problem without them -- I'm going to try, anyway. Another way to prevent blight is to plant blight-resistant varieties of tomatoes, but I wasn't paying attention to that sort of thing when I was buying my plants. Maybe next year I will look for different varieties, or plant in a different area. Experts say to wait 3-4 years to plant tomatoes in the same spot if they suffer blight.

Resources:
Purdue:
https://www.ppdl.purdue.edu/PPDL/expert/tomato-blight.html
Mother Earth News:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/organic-gardening/preventive-pruning-for-tomato-early-blight-control.aspx
Tomato Dirt, blog
http://www.tomatodirt.com/tomato-blight-early.html

Greens, Tomatoes and Herbs

Today, Ryan and I harvested our first collard greens and kale.

We only have one plant of each item, but I feel like we can still get a good amount off each plant. I read where you can harvest the outer leaves and they will grow back three leaves every five days. Ryan was skeptical, but I reminded him of how fresh garden produce is and not to compare to grocery store produce. The stuff in the store is already a few days, if not a few weeks, old by the time

Top layer is kale, bottom layer is collard greens

it makes it to the consumer's kitchen. We can store the greens up until we have enough to make something. It should only take two, maybe three harvests.

The garden is coming along nicely. I am seeing small, green tomatoes on most of the plants. I haven't seen any on the Lemon Boys, but those are a late harvest anyway. I've seen tons of blossoms on the Black From Tula, but haven't seen any tomatoes, yet. The Early Girls are getting bigger and any day now we will have multiple fruits off that plant.

Yesterday, I ate my first tomato sandwich of the season with some Early Girls I'd let ripen by the window. I've been picking the tomatoes when they are a light orangey-red color, then I set them by a sunny window and let them redden up. It frees up the plant to put energy into other fruit this way, plus, I've heard from gardeners that tomatoes don't get anything from the plant after the white to orange stage. Either way, it's worked for me so far. They don't seem to get any bigger so, why not?

I also picked a bunch of basil yesterday, and thyme. It helps the plants to bush out and produce more this blog and enjoyed reading the writer's experiences with failing at basil. I would rather read and learn from someone else's mistakes, so I figured you would, too, since you're reading this blog. In regards to the flowers, I've been picking mine off of my basil plants, so that I can keep harvesting. I didn't realize that's what I was supposed to do, and think maybe that's why it's dying off a bit. I'll try to get rid of all the flowers and see what happens. I need to harvest much more of it so maybe it will bush out.

stems with more herbs if you cut the plants regularly. I cut the basil from the top, down, about 1&1/2 inches.  I found

I noticed that with the pineapple sage it's bushed out a bunch. I did cut a substantial amount from it a few times now, so that proves cutting down herbs encourages growth.

I've only cut some thyme, but it's grown a lot, too. The rosemary is growing tall and has a couple extra branches that weren't there before -- I started with one, single stalk.

The cilantro has begun to produce small, green seeds where the white flowers used to be. Only a few flowers have begun to turn, but I bet the rest are quick behind them. I read where you can harvest them green for one flavor, and dry them out for a completely different flavor. The plan is to try both ways and compare, then let you know the findings.