All Hail Broke Loose

Welp. It's been a bad run. First we had that awful wind storm. Then last night we were walloped with rain and hail. If it weren't so bad, I'd probably cry. The tomatoes have been completely battered.

I put a hell of a lot of work into getting this garden up. It's the first year here, so probably the most work. I'm not sure if this would have been more devastating later in the season. Perhaps it is better it happened now. We had our first fruits on the Costoluto Genovese, the Uncle Mark Bagby and the Brandywine. Now all the plants are stripped of 70% of their leaves and scarred from the beating. The fruit still sits.... but it looks like someone shot bee bees at it.

I suppose there is a blessing in this. I am the Plant Killer after all. Now that the whole tomato crop has been pretty much wiped out, the rest of the season can be an experiment. I will tinker with fertilizing, watering, see if anything comes back. If we get a single tomato. How it tastes after hail damage.

That's it for now.

To Garden in Colorado is to be Crazy

As I set up my third line of defense on my completely beaten tomatoes this afternoon, a little quip ran through my mind. "Where is your god now?!?" rang over my thoughts. As is often the case in my internal dialogue, I wasn't being serious. But in a wry way, it was a bit true.

To garden in Colorado, I am learning, is to be crazy. The weather pops all over the place here. I remember last summer, when we arrived here from California, every afternoon a fierce thunderstorm broke over what had been a perfect blue sky spotted with the whitest of puffy clouds. I reveled in the dramatic weather, thrilled at being back in the land of thunder and lightning. My New England heart leapt at the prospect of my children growing up familiar with such gorgeous nature. The San Francisco Bay Area has splendid weather patterns as well, but they are milquetoast compared to other parts of the nation and you are lucky to hear one thunder roll a year.

Last summer, as I gloried in the storms, I had clearly abandoned any memory of gardening!

A few weeks ago, my ten tomato plant starts were whipped by incredible winds. One poor little puppy, the Hillbilly, was snapped. I believed it to be a hopeless cause, but it amazingly (limpingly) began to rally. After the wind, I got smart. I took the five Texas Tomato Cages I had, set them around the tallest plants (plus the Hillbilly) and wrapped the base of each TTC with bubble wrap, hoping to create a moderate wind break. It really looked like I had the weather licked!

In the calm weeks between, I set about getting the irrigation system in place and sat back to enjoy a more normal rhythm of fertilizing, pruning, etc.

Then, last night we were battered with an incredible storm. The rains were intense from 7-2 AM, coming on heavy then light. But at two.... the weather ended everything. We had 30 minutes, easily, of drilling, damning hail.

Today, we are expected to get more. So, my new design includes putting plastic trash bags on the top of each cage and hope that will save them more misery.

The Lazarus Hillbilly Tomato

Against all odds, my Hillbilly tomato plant seems like it is going to live! A few days ago, the poor thing got snapped by some fierce winds. Fortunately, its stem was snapped near the base and I had planted my starts pretty deeply. They were all about 16 inches in their pots, so I popped off the first sets of leaves near the dirt and set them in at about 8-10" in height when I planted out on May 15th. This means they had a deeper root system from the get go -- about 8-10".

When the winds struck the other day, my daughter and I rushed to save the plants. We dug this one up, created a deeper hole, added plenty of water and some fresh MaterMagic Organic fertilizer. Then we staked it to a spare bamboo pole I had sitting around.

I pretty much gave up on the plant, but figured it would be an interesting experiment to give it a few days. Welp, here we are a few days later and the Hillbilly has gone from a limp, weedy looking thing to something with a little punch in it. Here's a shot of it starting to perk up! Notice that it is now set within a Texas Tomato Cage that has been wrapped in bubble wrap as a wind and direct sun barrier.

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!!!

Potting Soil Comparisons

I came across this fantastically in-depth potting soil comparison the other day. It's too bad he only used one organic soil, as I'd much rather see how various organic soils fared with one another. Nevertheless, I'm impressed by his thoroughness! Here's his conclusion:

Supersoil's high germination rate and superior growth in both melon and tomato seedlings make it the preferred choice of the potting soils tested. When the additional factors of ease of handling, easy watering, fast drainage and low cost are also considered, it is the clear winner.

Peaceful Valley Farm Supply's potting soil came in a close second. But, the fact that it's four times the price of Supersoil after adding in the cost of shipping and not conveniently available makes it much less desirable. Another downside is that it contained weed seeds that germinated in the sample I tested. This was an annoyance that could be a serious problem for someone whose desired seedlings looked like the germinating weeds. How would he or she know which to remove?

They are many dozens of other potting mixes on the market that I wasn't able to test so this experiment can't be considered definitive. But, it strongly suggests that Supersoil potting soil is a superior product capable satisfying anyone's gardening needs. It's certainly the brand I'll be using in my garden from now on.
 

And here's a final note of warning that he makes about a horrible brand he used the year prior. Funny enough, this is the potting soil that I've been using (not the rose one, but the vegetable one). Yipes!

The year before the above comparison I purchased four bags of Gardener and Bloome's Rose Potting soil and used it to plant 77 pots with zinnia, tomato, melon, Canterbury bell and salvia seeds. The results were a complete disaster. Although I followed my regular routine for growing seedlings, a routine that's worked flawlessly for over 20 years, with this brand of potting soil I only got a 20-percent germination rate, the few plants that came up grew poorly, exhibited many disease symptoms and 30-percent of them died. Upon testing the soil I discovered that in spite of the package advertisements stating that the soil contained a wide spectrum of organic amendments such as bat guano, worm castings, kelp meal, alfalfa meal and so forth, the soil was completely lacking in nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous. Even after adding extra fertilizer the plants grew poorly. I've used many potting mixes over the years and this is clearly the worst. Perhaps I got a bad few bags out of what may otherwise have been a a good production run, but for myself I will never use this product again.

The Troublesome Cherokee Purple

My tomato plants are 6.5 weeks old. I've had the starts for a week as of today and one of them is showing signs of faltering. The third tier of leaves, counting from the top down, on the Cherokee Purple has some issues...