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!