Around the Garden

In the movie "It's Complicated," Meryl Streep's character has a gorgeous, awe-inspiring, and absolutely unrealistic culinary garden. I read an article a few months ago about just how fake the garden really was. So here are a few pictures of our real-life garden last summer and the produce that came from it.

My tomatoes get some sort of fungus every year. I think it's either fusarium or verticullum. I even bought Rutgers VFA seeds last year, which were supposed to be resistant. There is no good way to get rid of the fungus once it hits. It will slowly destroy the plant. You can slow its progress by pinching off and discarding infected branches.

Apparently, the best ways to prevent it are rotating crops, sunning/tilling soil during winter, and possibly bleaching the soil. I don't think I'm ready to get that serious about it, especially since we have to travel to get to our garden plot. Perhaps I'd be more aggressive if it were in my own backyard.

We've got six large cucumbers off this one plant. Most of them came after the verticullum wilt had already set in. (This is a disease carried by cucumber beetles.)

Lovely tomatoes, a cucumber and some Korean hot peppers. I believe the tomatoes split because we had a long dry period (during which I neglected to water) followed by a few big rains.