Curses!

As previously mentioned, gardening for me is not entirely about getting the produce in the end. Don’t get me wrong, if I’m putting money and time into this I want the end result. And with working on my cooking skills the more fresh produce I can bring into the kitchen from my own garden the happier I am. But for the most part it’s more than just that. It’s a retreat, a place to get my feet back on solid ground and my spirit back to where it needs to be. My rat race escape one might say.

No one in the community plot – that I know of – grows things to make a living. There are many, however, who use what they grow as an important part of their grocery budgeting. People who have created storage space to keep things like onions carrots and potatoes over wintered. We eat almost everything as it comes up although last year – my first with a garden plot – we had the last of the potatoes in late February, and they were fine. I was quite impressed, as it happens.

The only thing The Boy requested for the garden this year was cherry tomatoes. And then a brief mention that other tomatoes wouldn’t be a bad idea either. So I bought slicing tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, some yellow tomatoes and, with dreams of a freezer full of home made tomato sauce quite few plum tomatoes as well.

They got in late, due to all the rain we had at the beginning of the year. I was actually one of the lucky ones; many people didn’t get to plant at all due to flooding. Many more planted only to have everything die from root rot. The rain just went on and on! So I counted my blessings as I watched my garden grow.

Things continued cool and damp, so while I did have lots of tomatoes growing, even this late in August nothing was even starting to turn red. What they were starting to turn was a strange puckered brown. The potato plants started having brown spots on them as well. Very mysterious, I though. And then I got the email. The email that went to the whole garden community telling us that we had potato blight, affecting both potatoes and tomatoes. We needed to pull all the affected plants and toss them. Not even in the compost, but straight to the dumpster. We would be able to eat what potatoes we had, but any left in the ground would, as they did in the great potato famine, turn to black mush underground. All that work for nothing. How do farmers do it? Farming seems to be based entirely on hope, frustration, faith and patience.