Is probably impossible, but after losing all the tomatoes in New York, we’re trying to see if at least one of the Maine tomato patches ( 2 outdoors, one under plastic) can pull through and produce.
Organic management tools include:
Fungicide
Fertilizer
Being There
Being Careful
Being Realistic
Being fond of cherry tomatoes
And perhaps most importantly, Being a procrastinator – at least in our case… If I’d done all the tomato grafting I’d planned to do, there wouldn’t have been any leftovers in the greenhouse.
Tomato plants in the greenhouse have so far escaped the blight.
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That are being worked on.
Meanwhile:
Setting the bookmark to Recent Articles will land you on the blog itself instead of the welcome page.
When I started writing this thing I had no idea where it would lead. Still don’t. But I do know it’s high time to make the site more useful and that’s what I hope we’ve* done.
Posts are now filed by general interest in the banner categories, indexed by both subject and title and searchable by keyword, so you can find what you’re looking for quickly or browse to your heart’s content. Labels are self-explanatory except for Eek of the Week.
That’s for products and designs so crashingly ill-advised they do make me want to cry out. Title notwithstanding, EOTW is occasional; if I really saw eekworthy things weekly I’d be too depressed to write about them.
More new features are in the works and will be debuting shortly, so please keep an eye out for them. Glitches galore are inevitable, so please let me know about them. And please feel free to make suggestions. The work I’ve done all my life is known as service journalism and that’s not an idle promise.
* We are me and Drake Creative : Alex Tuller and Dean Temple, the brilliant ( and very patient) designers who dragged me – kicking and screaming – into putting a blog on my original website. They are to this enterprise what Kristi is to the Maine garden: absolutely essential. To say I couldn’t do it without them is the understatement of the Western World.
are all the wages of a wet summer, but the greatest of these is Late Blight. Our resident mycologist has the scientific perspective – and as he is also our tomato maestro, a very heavy heart. Here is his report on the New York garden, with a full explanation of the disease and how it spreads:
LATE BLIGHT –PHYTOPHTHORA INFESTANS– SWEEPS THROUGH THE NORTHEAST
By Bill Bakaitis
I was in Maine when the word came in: Late Blight was laying waste to tomato fields in the Hudson Valley. Oh, say it ain’t so I pleaded. Leslie and I had been extra cautions this spring in starting from seed, setting out, cultivating, and protecting our tomatoes, fifty or so plants of some twenty or so varieties, mostly open pollinated heirlooms. They were specially grown from selected seed in our own greenhouse and in another in Maine; some heirlooms were painstakingly grafted onto disease resistant rootstock. The spacing was good. The plants were held up by a twine-between-post well-ventilated system, the ground carefully mulched with bright straw over paper, and all the lower branches were removed so as to exclude the transmission of soil borne pathogens. In addition the plants had been treated with Bacillus subtilis (Serenade tm) to protect against fungal infection. Say it ain’t so I prayed as I piled into the car and raced home through a driving rainstorm, thick as I had ever experienced.
But it was so.
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This started out being about garden volunteers, the children of plants with such willing seed you can count on new generations more or less for the life of the garden. But including everything the list turned out to be so huge it was about 2 books worth – plus a whole gigantic sidetrack about invasives.
So then it was just annuals – flowers and herbs that more or less behave themselves. Then it was annual flowers and herbs that more or less behave themselves in the Northeast.
Then, unable to decide on images, I got it down to larkspur and Shirley poppies. And now, for the sake of brevity:
a volunteer Shirley poppy.
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Regular readers of this blog (and newcomers who put “mushrooms” in the search field) know we are enthusiastic wild mushroom collectors and consumers, and that one of us – Bill – is an expert who writes and lectures on mycology and is a consultant for the New York and New England Poison Control centers.
Calls are coming in almost daily, mostly concerning pre-verbal children exploring things before their parents can stop them, most of them, thank goodness, turning out fine. But as the recent Leccinum Warning shows, sometimes not so fine and that led Bill to ask me whether we’d ever posted the elementary rules of safe mushroom eating. Now we have.
Rules for the Eating of Mushrooms
By Bill Bakaitis
There are old mushroom eaters, and there are bold mushroom eaters, but there are no old and bold ones!
Here are 5 rules that the prudent Mycophage might employ:
1. DO NOT EAT ANY MUSHROOM UNLESS YOU ARE 100% CERTAIN OF ITS IDENTITY AS A SAFE SPECIES. CHECK IT OUT IN RELIABLE TEXTS.
2. TEST YOUR OWN REACTION TO EACH MUSHROOM BY EATING ONLY A SMALL PORTION OF A SINGLE SPECIES AT A TIME. REPEAT A FEW DAYS LATER TO TEST FOR DEVELOPED ALLERGIC REACTIONS.
3. MAKE SURE THE MUSHROOM IS THOROUGHLY COOKED BEFORE YOU EAT IT.
4. WHEN TESTING YOUR TOLERANCE FOR A NEW SPECIES, DO NOT CONSUME ANY ALCOHOL WITH THE MEAL OR FOR A FEW DAYS AFTER.
5. KEEP A FEW UNCOOKED MYSHROOMS IN THE FRIDGE FOR IDENTIFICATION SHOULD A TOXIC REACTION DEVELOP.
Why do these rules work?
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The potentially toxic Leccinum atrostipitatum (left) alongside the Edible Boletus edulis (right).
One of the nifty things about mycology (the study of mushrooms) is that the field is still largely unexplored, new finds and findings turn up all the time. This is a less-nifty thing about mycophagy (the eating of mushrooms, particularly wild mushrooms). It too is still largely unexplored, and new information about bad reactions turns up — not all the time, but frequently enough. Here’s the latest from our resident mushroom expert.
LECCINUM ALERT
by Bill Bakaitis
On July 14th, I received a call from New England Poison Control Center at Maine Medical center. An elderly man was in a New Hampshire Hospital with a severe, life threatening, illness contracted after eating Mushrooms. No specimens were available for imaging, but there were only two mushrooms involved, both Boletes. One was described as a ‘King Mushroom’, possibly in the Boletus edulis complex. The other was probably a Leccinum. Both identities were initially determined by two of the mushroom eaters, all of whom were self described as “good, knowledgeable mushroom collectors”
Two of the three people who collected and ate the mushroom developed GI symptoms three to five hours after the meal. One of them, an adult woman, sought treatment at the emergency room for her distress that evening. The elderly man, developed GI symptoms somewhat later, did not go to the hospital and felt a general malaise the next day. The third person, an adult man, had no symptoms at all.
Three days after the meal the older man was admitted to the hospital in poor condition.
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If only. As a species of aggravation, Marmota monax, the largest and most pestilential member of the squirrel family is impossible to get rid of. There are a number of reasons we will get into in a moment.
First, however, the good news: you can get rid of one or more individuals, and that can often make the difference between having a harvest and not. Furthermore, you can get rid of them using a live trap, especially if you use one from Williams Trapping Supply.
young groundhog in live trap, about to take a trip
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They’re out, just about right on time.
In spite of the deluginal rains, not too many mushrooms have come up yet, and a recent visit to a favorite spot was not very productive, so we weren’t expecting to come upon them.
Dumb. If you want to collect a lot of mushrooms, always expect them.
Chanterelles in the only container available
As usual, they were hiding – but visible to anyone who was on the alert for a glint of orange
Chanterelles in typical spot
Bill has already written a super guide to chanterelle hunting, so my contribution comes from the kitchen
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As far as I’m concerned, garlic gets the blue ribbon for growing your own. It’s absurdly easy to plant and care for; it tastes great; it looks beautiful and it takes up so little ground that even those with very small gardens can raise enough to be self-sufficient in garlic for a good part of the year.
All you have to do is choose the right varieties; plant at the right time, in the right soil; then harvest when just right and store correctly.
Home grown garlic, fresh out of the ground
CHOOSING VARIETIES
If you look in a specialist catalog like the one at Gourmet Garlic Gardens, you’ll find dozens of choices. The folks at Filaree Farm, who offer a hundred, divide them into 7 groups: Rocambole, Purple Stripe, Porcelain, Artichoke, Silverskin, Asiatic Turban and Creole. Gourmet GG says it’s 10 groups because they divide Asiatic from Turban and add Marbled Purple Stripe and Glazed Purple Ptripe to the list.
You see where this is going – and you can see a lot more on either of those websites, but for general purposes the most important difference is the one between softneck and hardneck.
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