Destruction

Something came over me this morning. I'm not sure quite what it was. Maybe it is the coming fall and my mind was on cleaning up the garden. Whatever it was I was quite hell bent on destruction.

The first up was my potato patch. They had flowered hmm maybe a little less than four weeks ago. The blight was really starting to take hold. Kenebec potatoes are resistant but not by any means immune to blight. I didn't see it deep in the bottom foliage for a long time but it was there. The other day I moved away some of the pretty green leaves and saw to my dismay massive late blight sending spores all over the place. Sigh.

Potato bin cleaned out (note the unwalkable path)

I ripped all the foliage up and packed it up into some nice black plastic bags. I tried to clean up all traces of any potato leaf. Underneath it all it was dripping with dead leaves. The potatoes had covered some of my tithoina and the tithonia was mildewing out. I don't know if tithonia gets late blight or it was just a bad case of some other mildew, but the two plants were pretty bad off. I ripped them up too. I'll leave the potatoes in their spot for a little while yet. I'll let the sun kill off some of those late blight spores before I dig them up. I'll probably dig them up during the next good dry spell (if we get one).

Then it was over to my tomato plants. There were a few more blighted leaves that were taken off. I noticed that almost all the Market Miracle tomatoes were either gone or turning red. I picked them all and ripped down those two plants.

The Black Moor tomato was getting blight all along its stems. I picked the one last tomato that was close to ripening and ripped the rest of the plant out.

By now I was having quite a bit of fun ripping out my plants. I looked at my Early Ssubakus Aliana and noticed she was getting worse. She doesn't seem all that affected by the blight, but she was turning yellow and not just her tomatoes. The irrigation system that I hacked together watered her too much. Her poor roots were probably rotting. I figured I ought to rip her up too. First I harvested just under three pounds of her fruit. Then off to the plastic bag for her.

By this time I had two full lawn and leaf bags. I'm going to leave them out in the sun today. Then I'll haul them to the transfer station. Sigh I usually don't throw very much away. Things get composted, recycled or reused, but the blighted plants will get dumped.

Since I was still in a destructive mood, I decided to clear my paths. The poor marigolds didn't have much room in their beds to grow, so they elected to spill over into the paths. I've been letting them grow there, but I've been getting annoyed by them. It has been so humid recently that the dew takes until about 11am to dry off. I can't pick anything in the morning without getting soaked walking by the marigolds. I cut them back so I would have some nice paths. While I was at it I cut back the tomatillos so they wouldn't be stepped on in the paths.I hauled a huge pile of waste to the compost pile.

Overview with my cleaned out paths

I don't know why ripping up plants is so cathartic. Maybe I'm taking my aggressions out on the plants, or maybe it is just the order that I achieve afterwards. I do like having a cleaned up garden and I love being able to walk down the paths without stepping on things. I will miss the waft of marigold scent though and I will miss picking massive quantities of tomatoes, but I still have my cherries at least until the blight gets them too.