Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Frustrated by the Garden

I think one of my tomatoes has blight. This does not feel very fair. It's been in the ground a mere week! I've picked off all the affected leaves/ stems, and am hoping for the best. Mostly I'm hoping it won't spread to the other tomatoes. If it has to be pulled out in the end, so be it. I also cleverly planted three different kinds of tomatoes in some haphazard hope that they wouldn't pass diseases between them.

I got on top of whatever went wrong with some of my broad beans by quickly removing anything that looked affected/ infected (sometimes leaves, sometimes whole plants), so cross your damn fingers for my Grosse Lisse tomato.

Not only that but snails ate all my sunflower seedlings. Not, like a nibble. We're talking, pull the whole thing out of the ground and eat everything but the seed casing - roots and all. I had half a pack of seeds left, so replanted. In an act of vengenance I gave up on the organic snail baits and commenced snail-bio-warfare with those awful little blue pellets. Cue ginormous, poisoned snails throwing themselves melodramatically all over the garden. I feel bad both for the snails and for using the poison. They shouldn't've eaten my seedlings.

Further, my purple beans and one set of sunflowers are taking forever to sprout. In fact, the sunflowers took so long I assumed they weren't going to sprout and replanted another set and now there'll be far too many and I'll have to thin them out and I hate doing that because it feels cruel to the weak seedlings and it's a waste of seeds. And my pumpkin seeds haven't sprouted yet either.

The broad beans have had a million blossoms drop off, and only one so far that I can see turning into a bean. The rest better perform better or my dreams of frozen beans won't come to fruition.

Stupid garden. Right now I pin all my hopes on the heirloom tomato and the leek seedlings I planted on Sunday.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have two brown thumbs and zero patience, so kudos for even attempting this. I know my dad is very sold on the concept of sacrificial plants - could you try those?