I got an email notice yesterday that Late Blight, which rapidly kills tomatoes and potatoes (among other plants), was discovered 200 miles away from me.
Why should you care and what should you do?
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Some of this year’s harvest.
Every other year we typically get a great apple harvest from our Gala tree. What you’re looking at is this year’s harvest, in a plastic bag in the trash can.
“You can’t always get what you want.”
For eight years I’ve been growing all my own garlic, for consumption and “seed” garlic to grow the next year’s crop. Garlic is, as I’ve said previously, one of the easiest and enjoyable crops to grow.
Unfortunately, something went wrong this year.
My garlic is usually done before others on my area, but I always chalk it up to varieties(I grow German and Music varieties) and the oddities of micro climates.
This year it was done, as exhibited by leaves browning, significantly earlier than others around me, and the results weren’t pretty.
The heads were either already splitting (typically a sign they’ve been left in the ground too long) or significantly smaller than usual.
Why? I don’t know, but even experienced farmers have crop failures, and not spending a penny on garlic for eight years seems a pretty good run, to me. A bummer for sure, but certainly not a tragedy. (Garlic I grow at several other locations seems be just fine. Still, I’m not seeing any evidence to suggest insect or disease as the cause in my home garden.)
Soon I’ll buy enough new seed garlic, enough to continue growing 180 plants, and hoping that they’ll last a good long time – at least another eight years.
(Here is how I grow garlic.)