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Late blight — Phytophthora infestans — better known as the cause of the Irish potato famine of the 1850s, has spread throughout Pennsylvania.

Every other gardener and farmer I know is suffering from Late Blight and expects to lose, or has already lost, most, if not all, of their tomato crop. We’re closely monitoring our own plants.

I’ve heard from friends in Philipsburg who lost most of their plants and salvaged only a few dozen tomatoes. I’ve heard of one farmer who lost 300 plants in a day. One of the gardeners at Penn State’s Community Garden tells me late blight has wiped out nearly everyone’s tomatoes there, too. We’ve now heard that Full Circle Farms has been hit as well.

We’re all hoping the Farm Tour, with its record turnout, hasn’t spread the disease even further afield, but with that many people walking around and moving between farms it is almost unavoidable.

We’re still fortunate to have healthy plants in our own garden. I have nonetheless ordered a bottle of Soap-Shield copper fungicide from Gardens Alive to be applied as a preventative measure. Organic gardeners are strongly encouraged to apply this or something similar before we see any lesions.

I deployed a new gadget in the garden Thursday evening: an EasyBloom Plant Sensor. It looks to be a partial solution to my automated garden thought piece from a few weeks ago, fulfilling the data collection step but not the instant updating requirement.

I’ll probably pull it in and retrieve the monitoring data later tonight. I’ll share a more thorough review once I’ve been using it for a while.

I went away for the week and came home Thursday evening to several of these green squash, pictured here with the rest of the evening’s harvest:

Burpee call them Sweet Hybrid Squash, but they’re also known as Magda or Kousa. They’re a variety from Lebanon. Unfortunately, five of them have grown too large to use for sauteing or grilling, but I understand they are amazing when split lengthwise and stuffed with lamb, rice, garlic, and seasonings and topped with canned or stewed tomatoes. I might get around to trying something with them by Sunday. If not, I’m cooking every night next week and will certainly make something with these beauties!

We also have yellow Pic-n-Pic Hybrid squash coming along and were able to harvest a few small squash.

Aside from a few disappointments, everything in the garden is doing surprisingly well (considering we have only watered it once when we planted the squash and pumpkins, we haven’t used any of the MiracleGro we bought, and the only artificial thing we’ve done is put some water-retaining crystals in the soil). Even one of the pepper plants that we thought would die is flowering.

The pumpkins aren’t doing nearly as well as they should be. We have lots of flowers but none of them are bearing fruit. The season is still young and we have nothing but time.

The tomatoes, however, are doing great! The Romas are forming bunches of four or five in several places, and most of the plants are producing fruit — even the ones we planted in recycled kitty litter buckets! The Sungolds are coming along and should be ripe in a fortnight or so. And the Rutgers heirlooms are showing promise, with several on track to ripen by mid-August.

Overall, we’re happy with the progress of this year’s garden. We’re disappointed that something ate all of our carrots and sweet potato plants, but now we know what we need to enclose with a fence next year.

I’m following Pothos on Twitter. I’m fascinated by the idea of the Botanicalls kit. In particular, I’m interested in its possible application to my garden. To that end, I’ve outlined a three-phase plan to fully automate watering my garden.

Phase one:
A Botanicalls unit networked over wifi, powered by solar power and enclosed in an all-weather box, emails me when the garden needs to be watered.

Phase two:
Addition of rechargeable battery pack to box to enable nighttime watering. Addition of automatic sprinkler system. Botanicalls sends commands to start and stop watering as needed.

Phase three:
Addition of weather report module. Before activating sprinkler, queries NOAA report and parses data to determine if rain is likely in the next 24 hours. If it will rain, watering is postponed.

This is obviously a work in progress, but that is what I am ultimately envisioning. I’m sure there are commercial systems out there — in fact, I have seen them — but I’m also sure they can’t beat a DIY system on price or sheer enjoyment of building something.

We planted the tomatoes (ten Romas, two Sungold, two Rutgers), two Peppers, and two Basil plants last evening. The Basil plants were included with our first CSA pickup on Tuesday.

We should get enough tomatoes from the Roma plants for a decent batch of sauce. The Rutgers should give us tomatoes for sandwiches throughout the season, and the Sungold should be perfect for just snacking. Hopefully all of the plants will make it, but we definitely had them indoors too long. Next year I’ll do better and won’t start them nearly as early.

We still have eight plants that we didn’t put in the ground because they are too spindly or we just didn’t have the space. We may plant the best ones in large pots on our back porch at the townhouse.

More pictures are available in the Garden 2009 Flickr set.

The seeds I planted a week ago have begun to sprout. I planted three types of tomatoes (Roma VF, Cherry Sungold, and Rutgers), green peppers, and Alpine Mignonette Strawberries. The strawberries haven’t sprouted yet, and they won’t for a few weeks, but most of the others have. That meant it was time to set up the grow light. We went with two 15-inch plant hangers (about $6 each from Lowe’s) and as you can see the setup looks pretty good. With the old fish tank stand in the corner of our kitchen, we have plenty of room for the pots when we transplant the starter plants into larger pots before we move them outdoors later in the season.

I spent most of Saturday at my parents’ house, which I’ve cheekily taken to referring to as “the farm.” Rototilling the gardens was a simple process and went much smoother than I expected considering the soil in the raised beds hadn’t been tilled in at least 15 and probably closer to 20 years. The soil had subsided by several inches, so we had about five inches of fresh, rich topsoil and compost spread over all three. I then tilled this all in and the beds are now resting.

I took some pictures and uploaded two of them to the Flickr album I created for this year’s garden.

I plan to go back out this weekend, weather permitting, to do some soil tests. I’m doing a basic battery of tests — Ph, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — to see if we need to do anything before planting. I don’t anticipate any surprises since this soil once was some of the best around, but I want to make sure our plants will actually grow.

Sunday night I started the tomatoes, peppers, and Alpine strawberries. We’re starting 18 Roma VF tomato plants, five Pepper plants, five Sungold Cherry Tomato plants, four Rutgers tomato plants, and 30 Apline strawberry plants. I don’t expect much from the strawberries because they are notoriously difficult to start from seeds, but I got a good price on the seeds and couldn’t pass up trying. Even if they all fail, I still have 25 ready-to-transplant plants on order for later in the season.

All in all, it was a successful gardening weekend. It looks like we won’t have much to do for a few weeks, but who knows what will come up.

Be sure to check out our friends at We Love DC and their new series on Victory Gardens in DC.

We’re fortunate enough to have about 312 square feet of raised-bed garden space and an additional acre of prime Central Pennsylvania farmland available to be planted for our garden this year. Check our WLDC for ideas on what you can do if you have significantly less space than that.

We began scouting out the garden this evening.

As a child, my parents, sister, and I worked in a set of raised-bed gardens, at one time even practicing a modified form of square foot gardening. (Why yes, we did watch a lot of PBS growing up. That’s what you do when you don’t have cable and the only television station you get with any consistency is from the local university.) Two of the beds measure roughly 16′ x 6′ and a third bed measures roughly 24′ x 5′. There hasn’t been a garden planted there in at least fifteen years. We are going to remedy that this year. Clearing the grass and brush so we can rototill the soil will be quite a chore, but I think it is worth it to grow some quality vegetables.

We’re starting with a few selections from W. Atlee Burpee & Co.:

• Sun Gold Hybrid Cherry Tomato
• Roma VF Tomato
• Rutgers Heirloom Tomato
• Red Delicious Hybrid Sweet Peppers
• All Blue Potatoes
• Kennebec Potato
• Shallots
• Thumbelina Carrots
• Golden and Red Ball Beets
• Butterstick, Pic-N-Pic, Sweet Zuke, and Sweet Gourmet Summer Squash
• Connecticut Heirloom Field Pumpkin
• Cherry Belle Radish
• First White Hybrid Cauliflower
• Brussels Sprouts
• Tenderpod Heirloom Green Beans

Our ultimate goal is to raise an all- or mostly-heirloom organic garden. For this first season, however, we’re going to rely on a few minor chemicals like MiracleGro, probably a pesticide or two like Sevin later in the season, and are only attempting a few easy heirlooms.

We are starting some of our seeds indoors, including tomatoes, green peppers, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and probably the summer squash. Since we don’t have any south-facing windows and receive poor sunlight through the windows we do have, we are also assembling a grow-light. We’re using a simple four-foot, two-bulb shop light we found at Lowe’s for under $9 and two four-foot GE plant lamps. The plants themselves will grow in those little just-add-water peat pellets, to be transplanted to larger pots until we can get them in the ground after the last frost (around mid-April here in Zone 6).

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