The barrels of blue potato-spray
Stood on a headland in July
Beside an orchard wall where roses
Were young girls hanging from the sky.
The flocks of green potato stalks
Were blossom spread for sudden flight,
The Kerr's Pinks in frivelled blue,
The Arran Banners wearing white.
From Spraying the potatoes by Patrick Kavanagh
I know that the poem should be about tomatoes, but there don't seem to be that many about. You put 'tomato' in Google and all you get are references to The return of the killer tomatoes which isn't quite the same. The link, of course, is that tomatoes are related to potatoes and can sometimes suffer the same fate in terms of disease. With the 'summer' that we've been having here, the back yard where I grow all my tomatoes has never properly dried out and warmed up. The result being plenty of damp air circulating around the plants. It's meant I haven't needed to water as often as normal but also increased the likelihood of tomato blight, the same disease that devastates potatoes and cured by the same copper sulphate mixture.
If you put 'tomato blight' into Google, then you get plenty of references, none of it particularly good news. A typically joyous piece of news came from thegardenhelper.com:
Picture your tomato vines looking robust and full of fruit... Within 3
days, your vines AND fruit turn black and withered, THAT is tomato
blight.
So I cut off as many leaves as possible and have been going out every day checking the plants. Slowly but surely, however, they have been getting worse and worse and now look like this:
I fear we won't be stuffing our faces on tomatoey pasta and eating salad until we look like it. On the other hand, the cucumbers - after one was devastated by a slug eating a hole in the end and then hollowing it out completely - are doing well. We have three or four now that are the right size to eat and, thanks to tesciowa, have the right ingredients to pickle them. Those ones look like this and we have high hopes for a pickling session soon:
Lifting them off the floor should have been done much earlier, but I didn't think. It was only slug damage that made me aware of it. Still, every day is a new learning experience and next year I hope to do better.
