Disease

Well, the container tomatoes are quickly succumbing to the fall blight. Only a very few tomatoes will be salvaged from them. I did "harvest" two lovely tomatoes, one with only a small bit of blight, from my cardboard boxes in the garage on Wednesday, which I added to a double batch of Roasted Tomato Sauce. Aside from those that were ripe when I pulled up the plants, I've managed to harvest about 17 additional pounds of tomatoes that ripened on a table outside and on my windowsill. There are still quite a few in the boxes. Of course, I cut blight from these tomatoes generously, so quite a lot less than 17 lbs. was actually usable.

After a little peeking around, I see the cucumber problem looks more like this. It turned the cucumber plant in our "original" garden from a healthy-looking plant to a crispy pile of leaves and stems in less than two weeks. There are now spots showing on the pickle cukes planted up on the hill along the fence, but I, again, hesitate to pull them up as they are producing well. From the description, this can apparently affect melons, too. So far, our melons appear unaffected (all three of them, LOL). I'm hoping they will be ripe before that happens, or maybe it won't happen at all. In the meantime, we're munching on cukes as long as they keep fattening up in our garden.

It is suggested that we do not plant things in the cuke family for a year because this remains in the soil.