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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.

I came out yesterday and found more of my corn plants loosing the battle against the heavy wind we are experiencing at the moment around here. The meteorologists say it’s not unusual at this time of the year but I’m noticing the wind because it’s damaging many of my plants, especially since I was convinced that this new garden was far better shielded against the wind. I guess I have to improve the protection against the wind next year as this has been a problem for me every year.

I have tried to rescue the rest of my corn plants that are still standing with poles hammered into the ground as a support structure:

As usual, the lazy man’s way to solve trellis problems in the garden – cable binders :

A better solution would have been using old seat belt – or even better: Protection against the wind.

My bean trellis was not strong enough either, as it collapsed when the pressure from the wind increased:

It’s difficult to imagine that this was once a bean trellis but check out this post to see the original structure: Building a Better Bean Trellis

Somehow I managed to rescue the trellis and you might even be able to find some beans in the picture:

Fortunately my tomato plants are well protected against the wind because they are close to the concrete wall, but then they were hit by blight – nobody said this would be easy . I have tried to do some damage control by removing most of the affected leaves and fruits. Now there’s not much foliage left to do the work but hopefully the plants will be able to cope anyway.

They remind me of my old tomato plants in my old garden. I didn’t prune them because of blight though, but because I wanted the sun to be able to reach the tomatoes. Now I’m not sure what’s more important – foliage or direct sunlight. I just know what we all want: Tasty juicy tomatoes, blight or not.

I’m still struggling with my five old apple trees in my garden. If they are left alone they grow like crazy, sending up a massive number of shoots:

They’ll quickly grow too big for my garden. Maybe if I only had one tree it would fit in the garden, but since they have always been pruned the limited area was never a problem. Last year I pruned them really hard and removed all shoots so only the bare stems were left (thicker than 5 cm / 2 inch in diameter). That resulted in not a single apple being produced. Bad idea.

So this fall I’m leaving a single shoot per stem, hoping that apples will develop on those shoots next year, where they’ll be one year old:

I guess the lesson is that apples won’t develop on wood younger than 1 year.

The ideal situation for me would be to plant an apple tree in a place with lots of space around it, and then forget about it until I would go out and collect the apples. And then let it grow according to its own genes and chop it down once it stopped producing apples.

When you start pruning hard it’s like you can’t go back to free growth without letting the tree grow into a big mess. So I have to live with the decision of the former owners and learn how to prune properly, as I don’t want to chop the trees down, since that would force me to go to the supermarket instead.