Tomatoes and End of July Garden Update

It is interesting to look at your garden and where it is compared to other people's gardens.  For example, my cucumbers are only about an inch long at this point. When I looked at Facebook the other day, I saw one of my gardening friends had already made pickles from cucumbers she harvested in her garden. Clearly, the cold weather by the lake has done no favors to warm weather loving plants like cucumbers.

How are your tomatoes doing?  Do they have any funny looking leaves on them? Have they set tomatoes yet? I have several plants with tiny tomatoes on them so I am a ways off from harvesting any tomatoes. However, the other day I noticed some yellow and brown leaves on the lower part of some of my tomato plants.  Here is what they looked like.

Anytime you see something like this you know something is wrong and action needs to be taken right away.  Problems can develop overnight with your plants and then get out of hand very fast. At this point, you have worked too hard to have something decimate your plants now. While these are not good signs for a tomato plant, if acted upon quickly it is nothing to get too alarmed about. My action, of course, was in the form of an internet search. I Googled images of tomato diseases. You get some pretty crazy looking stuff but after looking at several websites I determined that my plants had some kind of fungus. To me it looks like a fungus called Septoria or Early Blight. These are very common issues especially with the wet spring and summer we have had up until recently. I immediately went back to the garden and clipped all the stems off with any issues on them. I then put these infected stems in the GARBAGE.  I did NOT put these into the compost pile. Putting them in the compost pile means that the fungus will keep living and will reappear when I apply that compost at a later time.  Next, I added some mulch to the area underneath my tomatoes.  This will help keep moisture off the plant leaves. The most important thing to do is to bottom water your tomatoes so the water from your sprinkler does NOT touch the leaves. All these actions will help create a drier environment that is not conducive to fungus. Pretty sure I will move my tomato plants to a different part of the garden next year as well, just to make sure.

My yellow squash are coming in nicely and I actually got to harvest ONE of them last week.  The carrots are really doing well.  So well in fact, that if I wanted to I could harvest some.  Probably should do that since they are so sweet early on like this. In the past I have tried to stagger the harvest of my carrots. If you watch for rot in your carrots and keep them watered, the ground acts as a natural storage container. I have done this so late into the fall that I have had to cover them up with a blanket to protect them from frost. It is awesome to be able to go grab a couple carrots in October. I finally pulled my lettuce out.  I had gotten at least four cuttings from this planting so it was time to get the space ready for fall lettuce.  I will keep the area tilled, fertilize it once, and then finally layer it with some compost from my compost bin. After it rests for a bit like this it will be ready for a mid to late August lettuce seed planting. As you can see in the pictures the beans are really growing and have plenty of flowers on them. The onions are still growing with no signs of being ready to harvest.

Here are some pictures of my garden at the end of last week.