Today Is the Day

I have to pull out some of my tomato plants. BOOOO. For reasons unknown to me, some of them just aren't producing any usable tomatoes. Even though the tomatoes were there before The Blight hit, on some plants all the tomatoes themselves are all blighted and rotting before they even get ripe. But not all of the plants. It probably has something to do with the different varieties and how resistant they are to the fungus.

The happy news, though, is that while ALL of the plants have been blighted and are pretty much dying, they're not all dead yet! Yay! When I first saw the signs of The Blight on my plants and read up on it, all the sites I consulted were all gloom and doom and pull your plants up NOW because they'll be dead in a week and you won't get any tomatoes anyway.

Well. I respectfully disagree with the Cornell Cooperative Extension. I couldn't bear to pull them all up when the tomatoes were so close to ripe. So I left them out there. That was three weeks ago. And my faith has been rewarded by a fairly respectable harvest, considering the circumstances. Some plants, as mentioned, have just given up and everything on them is rotting. But some others, notably the Romas (love you, Romas!), have managed to produce quite a lot of non-blighted tomatoes. I don't really understand how some of the tomatoes on a plant can be blighted and some can be perfectly fine, but mine is not to question why. Mine is but to can or die.

However, some culling will be necessary today. I really need to clean up the tomato area. It's pretty gross, what with rotting fruits and decaying plants all over in there. So the sickest plants will be mercifully euthanized today, and I'll see how many more tomatoes I manage to get out of the plants that are left.

It's all so exciting, isn't it?