The good news…

First harvest of green beans, kohlrabi, and squash. Probably the last major harvest of broccoli. That yellow squash must have been hiding from me, because all of its siblings are still pretty small. I was poking around under the plant, just checking things out, and WHAM! there it was right in front of me! Normally, I would have picked it before now! It’s gotten lumpy, but its skin is still soft, so I think it should still be yummy to eat. Eventually, they get hard and that’s when you can use them for seed.

Now, the bad news. My plants are being afflicted by something, and I have no idea what it is, but it’s surprisingly broad-spectrum, and visions of losing large swaths of my garden are running through my head. The symptoms are as follows: yellow spots on leaves turn into dry, brown lesions, that eventually result in the entire leaf turning brown and wilting. The problem seems to have started on the lower leaves of the tomatoes. I went through today and picked off every visibly affected branch, and the pattern that I observed seemed to be that the affected areas were linked by physical contact. That is, if an upper branch of the plant happened to be bent down such that it was touching a lower, affected, leaf, the upper leaf would also be affected. The problem did not seem to go from the bottom of the plant, upwards, as would be the case with under-watering, or over-fertilizing, for example. The really disturbing thing is that, not only were tomatoes affected, but so were a few kohlrabi that were in contact with them. And so were some beans, summer squash, broccoli, and potatoes, that were not even in contact with the tomatoes. As I think about it, I’m starting to wonder if this is what killed all my early peas (and seems to be in the process of killing my 2nd batch of peas now).

It’s possible that this isn’t the same thing for every plant, but you be the judge. I took lots of photos (presented in a Flash gallery, because there are so many of them, apologies to those who don’t or can’t use Flash). If you click on any of the photos, you’ll be taken through to the gallery viewer where you can read the descriptions and browse.