so far, it's been a great growing year. our garden has vastly expanded, and our knowledge has grown even more. plus, it's a lot of fun to be your own boss.

i wanted to let everyone know that i am selling at the downtown buffalo farmers market on thursdays. it's on main st, near lafayette square from 8am-2pm. so come over to say hi if you're free.

i have sold out of veggies almost every week (turnip greens, however, did not go over very well). we make about $100/week, which i think is pretty good for our second year of this enterprise.

we were protected, at least for a lot longer than most farmers, especially the organic farmers, who can't use poisons to prevent the disease.

but late blight came to our farm this week. one week ago, our tomatoes were perfectly fine. but today we were forced to pull all of our 450 tomato plants. the signs appeared on tuesday. by thursday, i was fairly convinced, and friday i was sure. it took me a full day to convince mark, but he gave in today as well.

late blight is a disease that exists all the time, but it doesn't usually appear until after tomato season ends (after the first frost). but this year, a major distributor of seedling tomatoes (bonnie plants, in alabama) delivered infected plants to walmart, lowes, kmart, and other large stores in that vein. so everyone who bought their plants from those stores got infected plants. and although we had started organic plants from seeds, we eventually got blight, because the disease travels by air.

rochester has had no tomatoes this year. and pretty much everyone east of us didn't have any either. it is really sad.

we were actually lucky. despite the cold, rainy weather, we got to harvest vine ripe tomatoes for about 10 days before we got the blight. we got about 50 pounds of fresh, red tomatoes and enjoyed every single one of them. they were so good! i love tomatoes!

today we harvested the remaining green tomatoes that did not have signs of blight. about 200 pounds. they will ripen inside, but never taste as good as they would if they were ripened on the vines. 450 plants should give a harvest of about 4000-5000 pounds. we pulled the other plants out of the ground, because keeping them there would only help to spread the disease.

here are some photos, although the disease doesn't show up nearly as well on the photos as it does in reality. there are black splotches on the stems, the foliage is dying, and the fruits have darkened, leathery splotches. it is suggested that anyone noting this disease pull their plants right away. there is no cure, not even pesticides or fungicides at this point.



close up of green tomato. the "dead giveaway" sign of late blight is the white powdery substance, which contains the spores that are widespread by the wind.



nasty partially red tomato that rotted away, also containing white powdery spores.



our large harvest of green tomatoes.



beautiful harvest of heirloom tomatoes from the previous day.

despite this problem, will we grow tomatoes again next year?

hell yes!

This has been an amazing growing season for peas. They love cool, wet weather in the summer and will keep producing until the weather gets above 80 for a few days.

I have frozen over 45 cups of peas. Unfortunately, I do not yet have a full-sized freezer, so I can't freeze any more. We are eating and giving away as many peas as we can! We have been eating them fresh from the garden nearly every day for over a month. I just might turn green.

Here is the story of my largest pea harvest in a day.




It took about an hour to harvest these peas.




Here I am shelling the peas. This took about two hours.




Here is the result after I shelled them. (The bin in the back is the empty pea pods.)




Then I boiled them for about two minutes per batch. I guess this took about 45 minutes, as I had to rinse them in cold water afterwords.




I dried the peas before bagging them. This is so they don't stick together. ( I have since bought a salad spinner for this purpose.)




End result: around 20 cups of peas this evening!


I do not understand how Tops can charge only $1 for a pound of shelled frozen peas. This is a lot of work! Don't get me wrong, though, I am happy to have enough home-grown peas to eat all winter long.