Rescuing My Tomato Plants

When I find these new shoots on my tomato plants I normally pinch them off to force the plant to focus its energy on the developing fruits instead of foliage, but now that all of my plants are affected by blight I suddenly find myself welcoming these new shoots as they provide much needed foliage since the old has been damaged or wilted away:

Luckily it seems that the leaves affected with blight just dries up and breaks off and don’t cause damage to the main stem of the tomato plant:

I removed the affected foliage and tomatoes and the plants are beginning to look healthy again:

Time will tell if they’ll survive long enough to produce mature tomatoes. As you can see in the picture above there are not many leaves left to do the work.

… which is exactly the problem with my broccoli and cauliflowers too – them caterpillars hungry!:

What I should have done was to grow these plants in a tunnel so that the mother of these caterpillars couldn’t have laid her eggs on the plants when they were small.

Oh well – I’m actually proud that the plants grew this big. Besides the damage done by caterpillars the plants look really healthy. Next year I’ll build a tunnel. And oh – we actually did harvest one broccoli, a real nice one too.