OK folks, we are into blight, powdery mildew and aphid attacks.
Cut that blight out of those tomatoes and get the cuttings away from the garden and into the city compost bins. Clearly you should be harvesting the tomatoes too and dealing with them. Nothing disease likes better than a pile of overgrown neglected plants... it will spread like a wildfire. You can cut back a lot of the tomato plant to give it some room to produce. Now don't be shy... think about it, if you have a bunch of tomatoes rotting on an overgrown plant, then you have more than you can deal with... let the strongest most promising part of the plant shine powered by the large root network you have developed all summer.
If you have a squash type of vine and it is covered with powdery mildew you might be well advised to get rid of it. The last thing you need is a concentration of powdery mildew in your garden coming into the fall. If it looks like you might get a lot more fruit that you will use and the mildew doesn't seem too bad you could perhaps leave it, but we are in that territory where you have to start thinking about getting what you can while you can. Don't be a promoter of mildew in a community garden. One thing you can do if you have a powdery mildew problem is ask yourself why? Often times your plants are in too tight and are thus less healthy, or perhaps they were weakened by drought when you didn't get a chance to water, or they were shaded. I did a walk around the garden and some had it bad and others not so bad. Big healthy plants in good soil in prime sun spots with room to grow that received adequate water to the roots and not the leaves throughout the growing season often do much better. So you missed it this year, it happens, but by leaving the mildew in your plot you will maintain a concentration of the mildew in your soil... something you don't want.
I had a couple of Romanesco broccoli plants in my plot that were illegally creeping out onto the paths... they were massive with large leaves that shaded my beans and some tomatoes... i wasn't getting a lot of broccoli actually none to be exact, but my regular broccoli plants have been stomping balls. I did a closer inspection tonight and noticed a good aphid colony growing where the fruit was coming, so i manned up and ended their reign in the garden. For sure they sucked a lot of good nutrients out of the soil to get so big, so i was at a loss... do i try to hold out in hope of something? It is the gardeners dilemma... you hate to kill plants, but then there is reality... you need to think in terms of absolute yield and if some silly plant is is putting a hole in your boat then clear sailing is not in your future. You would be much better off with some lettuce seeds in the spot dominated by aphid ridden cabbage family plants. Now i realize that there are many armchair wizard gardeners out there that will go on about miracle herbal cures for aphids and yes with massive effort you can reduce an aphid infestation... i would liken it to taking out a loan to buy a lottery ticket to get yourself out of debt. Not a smart money bet... if you are infested with aphids then you are on the wrong track to begin with... now it might not be your fault but it has happened, it is your responsibility as caretaker of the plants to make these executive decisions. Another gardening as an analogy to a good life scenario... sometimes if an aspect of your life is not working it is because it wasn't meant to be and perhaps putting more energy into this aspect is not the right thing to do.
My father had lists of plants that did well in his garden and others that did not... as time went by he grew the things that worked in the garden he had. Gardens are weird beasts you have to let them communicate to you by listening to what they are telling you. For the record the garden doesn't actually speak to you in words, although i sure you could find a few humans that would argue that... you need to look for the signs... a good sign is a plant doing really well, a bad sign is a plant doing really poorly... sorry for the tutorial on the obvious, but... You know why ointment says on the package "do not ingest, for topical use ONLY"? It is because some moron ate ointment to try to cure their skin disease and then tried to sue the doctor because the doctor never told them.
So now... if your garden is now fast becoming a cesspool of disease there is another option... mow it down and try a winter planting. That's right it's not failure, it's opportunity... the time is always right for something... the wall street genius is always ahead of the pack... so should the granola street gardener. There is nothing wrong with what happened unless you fail to learn from it.
Cut that blight out of those tomatoes and get the cuttings away from the garden and into the city compost bins. Clearly you should be harvesting the tomatoes too and dealing with them. Nothing disease likes better than a pile of overgrown neglected plants... it will spread like a wildfire. You can cut back a lot of the tomato plant to give it some room to produce. Now don't be shy... think about it, if you have a bunch of tomatoes rotting on an overgrown plant, then you have more than you can deal with... let the strongest most promising part of the plant shine powered by the large root network you have developed all summer.
If you have a squash type of vine and it is covered with powdery mildew you might be well advised to get rid of it. The last thing you need is a concentration of powdery mildew in your garden coming into the fall. If it looks like you might get a lot more fruit that you will use and the mildew doesn't seem too bad you could perhaps leave it, but we are in that territory where you have to start thinking about getting what you can while you can. Don't be a promoter of mildew in a community garden. One thing you can do if you have a powdery mildew problem is ask yourself why? Often times your plants are in too tight and are thus less healthy, or perhaps they were weakened by drought when you didn't get a chance to water, or they were shaded. I did a walk around the garden and some had it bad and others not so bad. Big healthy plants in good soil in prime sun spots with room to grow that received adequate water to the roots and not the leaves throughout the growing season often do much better. So you missed it this year, it happens, but by leaving the mildew in your plot you will maintain a concentration of the mildew in your soil... something you don't want.
I had a couple of Romanesco broccoli plants in my plot that were illegally creeping out onto the paths... they were massive with large leaves that shaded my beans and some tomatoes... i wasn't getting a lot of broccoli actually none to be exact, but my regular broccoli plants have been stomping balls. I did a closer inspection tonight and noticed a good aphid colony growing where the fruit was coming, so i manned up and ended their reign in the garden. For sure they sucked a lot of good nutrients out of the soil to get so big, so i was at a loss... do i try to hold out in hope of something? It is the gardeners dilemma... you hate to kill plants, but then there is reality... you need to think in terms of absolute yield and if some silly plant is is putting a hole in your boat then clear sailing is not in your future. You would be much better off with some lettuce seeds in the spot dominated by aphid ridden cabbage family plants. Now i realize that there are many armchair wizard gardeners out there that will go on about miracle herbal cures for aphids and yes with massive effort you can reduce an aphid infestation... i would liken it to taking out a loan to buy a lottery ticket to get yourself out of debt. Not a smart money bet... if you are infested with aphids then you are on the wrong track to begin with... now it might not be your fault but it has happened, it is your responsibility as caretaker of the plants to make these executive decisions. Another gardening as an analogy to a good life scenario... sometimes if an aspect of your life is not working it is because it wasn't meant to be and perhaps putting more energy into this aspect is not the right thing to do.
My father had lists of plants that did well in his garden and others that did not... as time went by he grew the things that worked in the garden he had. Gardens are weird beasts you have to let them communicate to you by listening to what they are telling you. For the record the garden doesn't actually speak to you in words, although i sure you could find a few humans that would argue that... you need to look for the signs... a good sign is a plant doing really well, a bad sign is a plant doing really poorly... sorry for the tutorial on the obvious, but... You know why ointment says on the package "do not ingest, for topical use ONLY"? It is because some moron ate ointment to try to cure their skin disease and then tried to sue the doctor because the doctor never told them.
So now... if your garden is now fast becoming a cesspool of disease there is another option... mow it down and try a winter planting. That's right it's not failure, it's opportunity... the time is always right for something... the wall street genius is always ahead of the pack... so should the granola street gardener. There is nothing wrong with what happened unless you fail to learn from it.
