It’s Sunday and it’s another cool and gloomy day. I have been immersed in a battle with tomato diseases, both at work trying to give out informed advice and at home trying to save my own plants. My beautiful tomato bed seems very sparse now, I have removed tons of diseased leaves and stems. There is lots of ripening fruit still, but I wonder how long I can keep them going. It seems there are several diseases attacking tomato plants, I believe mine have septoria leaf spot. Besides removing diseased leaves I have been spraying with neem oil- although not as often as I should have I guess - or the neem oil doesn’t work. The experts recommend daconil- but I just can’t see growing tomatoes at home if you have to spray them as much as a commercial grower.

I guess you have to choose any more. Have home grown tomatoes by spraying them with chemicals or lose all your work just as they start to ripen. I don’t want to hear the junk about healthy soil and compost tea. Sorry, while those are great they don’t stop fungal disease. Every year I listen to the organic gurus spouting about compost tea and making your soil healthy. I want to see their tomato gardens this year. Some of the organic remedies, like the copper sprays, have higher toxicity than daconil. And the trial results I see on the New Ag network and elsewhere don’t give very good reports on all the organic products.

I think my raised bed soil is pretty healthy, my plants looked great and were loaded with fruit. They are off the ground and mulched. I rotate where I plant them each year. I have 12 different varieties of tomato and yes, some do better than others fighting off fungus but all have it to some degree. I have plants in pots and plants away from the one big tomato bed in another raised bed. Every plant has some degree of fungal disease.

I did get some very good tomatoes off the Cherokee Purple plant I planted. They are so yummy I just sat and ate them by themselves. They are quite ugly fruits and hard to tell when ripe- the turkeys had sampled one and that made me guess they were ready. The Early Girls are ok, as are the Celebrity. Celebrity is supposed to be disease resistant but this year my Celebrity is one of the hardest hit with disease. I have some Birkstone Orange, John Baer and Limmony about ready to pick.

I am starting to get cucumbers. The Alibi cuke we planted in the experimental garden and I planted here have proved resistant to powdery mildew and are very prolific. We are picking lots of Dragon’s Tongue beans from the experimental garden and the soup kitchens say they are great. We are overwhelmed with patty pan squash and we only planted a few plants in the experimental garden. We had more squash than the soup kitchen wanted or the seniors in our building.

I dug about 20 pounds of red and white potatoes from our 4 x 10 raised bed last night. We have been harvesting them several times a week for a month now too. The vines were getting fungal disease and naturally dying back and I decided to get them out before the tubers were affected. We now have all sizes from tiny reds to big whites. I also dug out some nice big white onions, the best onions we have grown in years.

Our sweet corn has been good too. The larger eared yellow I planted later is about ready to harvest. We have been eating the smaller early white corn for the last few weeks. I am no longer able to get any strawberries because the turkeys discovered them and patrol the beds each day. The apples are starting to color and they seem to look pretty good, even without spraying. They are still very sour though.

Horses were moved back to the east pasture to give the west pasture a rest. They were breaking down fences over there again too. Trying to keep them out of the pond area but Charlie kept going over the fence. Some of our hens are going broody on us, which is rare with Isa Browns, our egg production has really dropped.

Honey, the cocker, is going to have pups early next month. That was a bit of a surprise as I didn’t think she and Bubba mated - even though I put them together twice- he didn’t seem real interested. Guess he fooled me. She is going to be groomed tomorrow to get her coat cut close before she gives birth. We haven’t had pups here in about 18 months so maybe it won’t be too bad. I do love playing with pups but they are so messy. And the money will come in handy to buy propane before real cold weather, if they sell well in this economy.

county fair

I just returned from a looong week at the Eastern Michigan Fair. I am responsible for overseeing the Lapeer County Master Gardener building, where the wonderful volunteers put up a variety of displays and conduct a silent auction and bake sale to raise money for their awards banquet. This year we held a photo contest too.

Our exhibit had a compost display, complete with homemade bins and a worm composting display, we had a garden of tranquility, a victory garden, a medicinal herb garden set up to look like an old doctors office and a rain garden with a display of rain barrels also. Volunteers spent hundreds of hours growing the plants and making the displays.

Our problem in this beautiful building is lack of exposure. All of the buildings holding inside exhibits are at one end of the fairgrounds and all the rides and animals are at the other. Guess which way people tend to go? This year the weather was pretty good until the last day- when it literally rained inches of water on to the fairground. Later that night strong storms blew through and made a mess of the fairgrounds.

I do like the fair for a day or two, but this week long thing is pretty tiring. I really feel for the parents who camp through the whole fair so their kids can show animals. What a long week that must be. On the last day a horse barrel race was still going on through pouring rain and parents were sitting there at ringside drenched to the bone.

People watching is kind of fun. You get to see all kinds at the fair. Some visit us specifically, others just wander through. I talk to a lot of people about gardening and about pets, their lives, you name it. You also get to eat fair food, which is greasy and fattening but so good.

One thing I do not like at fairs is a “birthing” exhibit, which our fair decided to have this year. Farm animals do not like to give birth in front of crowds. It is very stressful to them. Most manage to give birth at night or in the very early morning anyway because they have the ability to delay labor a bit until things are calm. On the farm the animals separate themselves from other animals and people to give birth if they can.

The newborn young are subjected to too much petting, noise and stress at these fairs. They are poked, prodded to get up, blinded by flashing photo lights, and fed inappropriate things. They are often separated from their moms, especially calves, so the moms won’t hurt someone trying to protect them. Yes, I know dairy calves are taken away from mom and often hauled to auctions right away but it doesn’t make it right. Baby chicks hatching behind glass maybe, but leave the other animals home to give birth and through the first week or so of life. Our state fair has vet students on hand to watch the animals but at the small fairs it’s usually 4-H or FFA kids. When things go wrong they may not know what to do.

I don’t know why the Humane Society, with all the things they complain about, doesn’t complain about this. I feel it’s cruel and inhumane to exhibit animals in the last days of pregnancy and also to exhibit newborns.I don't think county fairs need to have birthing exhibits or state fairs either.