- Late blight. It's all over Ithaca, and most of central New York, and my community garden. It's actually kind of heart-breaking -- lots of people, including my gardening partner-in-crime H., had to pull up their tomato plants because of the dreaded plague. It's an ugly sucker, too, with that evil black stuff poisoning the vines. It first started in a big-box store a few miles away (another reason to support local farmers and buy only locally grown seedlings blah blah etc.) but the spores go airborne pretty quickly, and then everyone's done for. I think I got lucky because my tomato plants just happen to be at the end of my garden, isolated from other people and each other, and are also...
- Sad, stunted plants. Seriously, the biggest tomato seedlings, the two I bought from the farmer's market? MAYBE a foot and a half tall. And that is being charitable. All the rest that I started from seed, including the Oregon Springs that are supposed to be early producers, are sad little runts. Perversely, that might be what saved them from the dreaded blight: There just wasn't as much surface area for an airborne spore to grab.
- Rain. It rains every. single. day. and for a long time, too. Big soaking rains. All the bottom leaves are yellow, the soil is soggy, everything is sagging. Some of my herbs, especially the cilantro and the dill, are turning this weird rust color in addition to the sickly yellow and pale green. I'm sure the clouds are responsible for the above-mentioned stuntedness, too... last I checked, plants need sun to grow.
- Bugs. They love the rain and the soggy soil and they are just the HAPPIEST bugs you ever did see. Cucumber beetles, squash bugs, cylindrical black things, god knows what else. Isn't it thrilling that I can provide such a fine home for them.
- And finally, birds. The one plant that likes this crap weather, the peas, are being pecked apart by evil demons from the sky. They don't even eat the whole things -- they delicately remove all the peas from inside the pods and then leave the remainders hanging on the vine like little victory flags. I have a large ridiculous plastic owl on the top of the trellis; the birds are not fooled.
(Shannon's recipe for ginger sugar snap peas did them justice.)Oh yeah, and I was in Chicago for a week and went to an excellent conference with 14,000 librarians. And J. is almost done with his dissertation (knocking wood, crossing fingers) and school is kind of killing me but in a good way and my internship is going well. And I'm taking tonight off from everything to knit and watch Top Chef Masters, and going to Harry Potter tomorrow night. And in between, I will be weeding, killing bugs, and trying to chase birds off while waving my arms around like a lunatic.
1 comment:
Oof. I hear you. I'm having the same problem down here with the runty plans. I put my tomato seedlings in the ground about 2 months ago, and some of them aren't even a foot tall yet. None of my peas survived. The day after I put them in the ground it was about 100 degrees and they didn't survive the first 48 hours. So, basically I have 5 stunted tomato plants and 4 squash plants (which seem to be doing ok - they have blossoms...) but that's about all I'm left with after all the seed-planting I did. My carrots never made it out of the peat pots. Oh, my basil, chives and green onions appear to be doing well. Cilantro died off already. Sigh.
Anyway. Could you cover the peas with a net? You can get a roll of netting at the garden center that you just unroll over your plants. We used it for our raspberry bush a few years ago (which has also since died and not come back) and it really kept the birds away.
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