A sad tomato tale

Soon after I planted my tomatoes, it started raining. Then it stopped. Then it started again. It was unseasonably rainy and kind of miserable. I pulled the pepper plants under the porch roof because I remembered from last year that they don’t do well with lots of water, but thought the tomatoes would be okay.

Well, after a few weeks of on again, off again rain, I started to notice black spots on some of the tomato leaves. An internet search suggested that blight was the likely culprit—a fungus that shows up in moist weather and will spread throughout the entire plant and nearby plants if not stopped. I cut off all of the leaves that had spots on them, more or less scalping the poor plants, but it continued to spread. Leaves were turning yellow, and blackness was creeping up some of the stalks. Where I’d cut branches off, new ones were growing, but they were growing in crumbled and dead-looking. The leaves felt crunchy and stiff—more like they did last year in October than they should have been in June. It was becoming clearer and clearer that the tomato crop was borked.

One of the pots, the day I decided to take them off life support. It looks okay from a distance, but up close, it wasn’t pretty.

The sad part was, one of the six plants (the grape tomatoes) had a ton of green tomatoes on it. I thought I’d wait a little longer, but they didn’t seem to be ripening, and the other plants weren’t following suit. A few brown berry tomatoes showed up, but no cherry tomatoes at all on any of the four plants. (The cherry tomatoes also seemed to have the worst of the blight, which makes me wonder if those four were maybe messed up to begin with.) There were plenty of flowers but they were just dropping off. The grape and brown berry plants had grown very tall, but the others seemed to have stopped growing completely. I spent days worrying that my tomato plants would die and I wouldn’t have any tomatoes all summer and it would all be because I hadn’t done the right thing about the blight.

Then on Sunday, after several minutes listening to me bemoan the loss of the tomato crop, Geoff asked, “Why don’t you just throw them away and start over?”

But, but, but… what about all those unborn tomatoes?!

Just a few of the baby tomatoes that sacrificed their lives.

I was being emotional; he was being logical. (This is usually the case.) And the plants were so scrawny and unhappy looking, I knew he was probably right. First I picked all the green tomatoes and made salsa with this recipe (added a bit of cilantro and habanero, yum!) Then I went in search of new plants. The good thing, I guess, about buying tomato plants in June rather than April is that the plants are farther along. Some even had green tomatoes on them. In some ways that feels like cheating. But I’m impatient—I want my tomatoes, damn it!—so in other ways, it’s just fine.

I couldn’t find any grape tomatoes, unfortunately. In fact, the selection of small tomatoes was pretty, err, small. I bought a yellow pear tomato, which I’d wanted to plant initially but couldn’t find, as well as another brown berry plant and two Sweet 100 cherry tomato plants. I also got a Lemon Boy—a medium-sized yellow tomato—and an Early Girl, which is also supposed to be on the small side. We dumped out the pots, including the soil since it was probably infected with blight, and started over.

Speaking of vegetables running amok, a few weeks ago I got tired of the bok choi going nuts and pulled out the remaining plants. They’d all begun to flower and tasted bitter. I added a chive plant to the pot, which is doing well so far. The Swiss chard hasn’t been liking the heat, but I’ve been able to salvage some of it.

The unruly bok choi, just before I wrested it from the earth.

The peppers are finally starting to emerge, which is exciting. The sweet ones are farther along than the hot, but I noticed the first few Hungarian Wax peppers peeping out today…