First Tomatoes of the Season!

I lied right there - in the blog post title. These aren't technically the first tomatoes of the season. We've already had a smattering ripen early, but they never even made it into the house for a wash. We just popped them into our mouths too quickly.

Here's the first photograph of the first (ish) tomatoes of the season. 

There are three varieties shown here. At 1 o'clock is the Isis Candy - very sweet. This lives in the back tomato patch. At 4 o'clock is the Early Ssubakus Aliana, also sweet. It's in one of the big planter boxes on our driveway. 6 o'clock features a small Cherokee Purple. There are monstrous ones hanging on the plant right now that dwarf this little one. It was a tasty tomato on my bagel! Finally, and 8 and 10 o'clock are two Black Cherries. This is the blighted plant, but it's producing well so far (I've trimmed off the offending leaves and stems). The plant does look scrawny, with super long stems and not very bushy, but the fruit is delicious so far.

The Plant Killer Strikes Again - Flooding

I am a one-person biblical disaster when it comes to the care and maintenance of plants. Lord help me if I ever have to depend on growing my own food! Due to ignorance, forgetfulness and / or the outcome of having a puce thumb, I seem to provide my poor plants with so many variants of plagues and wrath to have to survive. Only the heartiest plants can handle life in my garden!

Today was no exception. Poor plants. For the second year in a row we're having odd issues with our automatic sprinkler / irrigation system. It seems that my gardening efforts are fated to have mechanical problems! The sprinkler system goes off sporadically. Sometimes it stays on schedule to water every morning for 10 minutes, then suddenly it won't work for two weeks. It's set to go off early in the morning, so I don't always know if it's watered the garden or not. We have it set to drip irrigation, so you have to put your finger in the dirt to be certain it's been watered.

The system hasn't worked all week, and I've been running it manually, but not daily because I wanted to pare back the watering a bit anyway. I ran the water this morning for what I'd planned to be 10 minutes... then promptly forgot about it..... for AN HOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We'll see how my poor plants deal with the flooding. The good news is that the garden is set at the top of a hill, so it's not like the plants have to sit in puddles of standing water. I hope I haven't ruined the crop! The tomatoes were just really starting to boom.

Aack! My Tomatoes are Blighted!

I'm no tomato doctor. If anything, as per the title of my blog, I'm a tomato undertaker. True to form, it's mid-July and after an early blush of plant coddling over the spring and some booming growth... one of my tomato plants is ailing.

Last Year's Fails: 
Blight on the Brandywine?
Last year, my pink brandywine became extremely sickly. It produced one lonely and mealy tomato and, in the end, it looked a bit like a dog hung on its choke-chain. That's not an image I like to promote, but that's what it looked like -- it had lost almost all its leaves in a slow turning from dark green to pale yellow and this one tomato was on one of the highest branches. It wavered there on this thin neck of a branch as the plant became progressively sicklier and scrawnier. The brandywine was the one plant I had really looked forward to, as I'd surmised the tomato's flavor would be most like my husband's childhood tomatoes. So, I strung the poor thing up pretty high to keep it from drooping over onto the driveway.

In retrospect, I think this plant had blight, especially now that I've read up on the condition more.


Another Blight?
I had another plant go pretty badly, as I recall now. The leaves never got too diseased-looking, but the fruits were all leathery and gross and the plant never really thrived. I think it was the Black Plum. The Illinois Fruit and Vegetable News has pretty good descriptions of some ailments for tomatoes. In the blight description, it mentions "leathery" fruit, which this plant definitely had, but it didn't have so much leaf death.

Blossom End Rot
 I had two plants with an obvious condition last year - blossom end rot. Both the Gourmet Yellow Stuffer and the Scatalone lost almost all their fruit to this last year. The Scatalone is a long fruit anyway, and my understanding is that tomato shape can have an effect on the condition.

This Year's Fail: Blight on the Black Cherry?
So, we're just barely getting our fruits in now with lots of beautiful looking green tomatoes on all the plants... but my Black Cherry has suddenly become a withering plant with brown leaves and browning, soft stems. The leaves have some black speckles too.... is it blight? Yikes!!!