I may actually get tomato sauce this year! I don't have enough plants to have big, all-at-once harvests, so these guys are being cored, seeded, and frozen as they come ripe a few at a time. The other plus side to this method is that by the time I have enough tomatoes for a big batch of sauce, it'll probably be September, and (one would hope) much cooler!
Sadly, I may have to give up on the pickles. It's taken three years, but I can no longer avoid the fact that trying to plant cucumbers as a succession crop in New England is doomed to failure. Powdery mildew will hit at roughly the same time every year, no matter what I do to prevent or stop it. If I want pickles, I really need to get my cucumbers into the ground as early as possible. It's the only way I'll get a good crop before the cucumbers start to look like this:
I'll try again next year!
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Alison, that looks like you are trying to grow cukes in the snow! Is that powdery mildew? I have seen it on leaves before but not bad down here. Another blogger up north has problems with that but I didn't know it was that big of an issue! But congrats on those tomatoes, slow but sure, you will get sauce!!
ReplyDeleteNo, the white stuff is not powdery mildew! I'd completely forgotten about that, I've had it there so long :) I had some wool that wasn't ever going to be pleasant or easy to spin. I had plenty more where that came from, so I decided to cut my losses and use the bad stuff as mulch. It'll take a while to break down, but it'll add nitrogen back into the soil as it does.
ReplyDeleteThe powdery mildew isn't really visible, except for its effects: note the yellow leaves, and the brown shriveled things that used to be leaves. Also, my cucumbers are now terribly misshapen. The first four were beautiful. The rest - I don't know if they'll be worth bothering with :(