When all my garden neighbors lost their tomatoes to blight, I began to worry. I trimmed the tomatoes for better air flow but it was not enough. I did what I could to help the plants. It has been a wet year, wetter than even I feared. Let’s try and save my tomatoes, shall we?

Those are my tomatoes. I just took out almost all of my tomatoes. I’m not sure if any of the ones that I left are gonna make it. And I just, I can’t do this anymore. I need, I hate this.

But let’s start at the beginning.

I had worried about the tomatoes for a while. It has been an extremely wet year.

So, at the end of July, I set out on yet another rescue mission: saving the tomato plants.

On a sunny afternoon, my husband joined me in the garden. At that point, the tomatoes were still looking good. A jungle, but a green jungle.

But it had been raining for weeks, and the forecast wasn’t getting any better. I was worried.

All my garden neighbors had lost their outside tomatoes to blight already.

In retrospect, I should have done this sooner, maybe trained them to a single stem each. But I kept thinking it had to stop raining at some point. It didn’t.

So, under Pepper’s “watchful” eye, I trimmed away.

It felt like I was taking away more than half of my tomato plants.

All the suckers, and anything remotely yellow or brown was chopped off and added to the compost pile.

Part of me still thinks that the trimming here is what opened up wounds for the blight to get in.

A volunteer pumpkin came up between the tomatoes. I still don’t know what variety exactly.

But by now, I’ve narrowed it down to one of the Cucurbita maxima. Edible pumpkins! Yay!

To get it out of the tomatoes for more air flow, I moved it up one of my trellises.

I took it out of the peas now that the sunflowers are large enough.

I’ll leave most of the branches on the ground but this one was endangering the tomato next to it.

Pepper couldn’t decide if he wanted to be near me or near my husband. He kept switching back and forth.

Once he was settled–and no longer on top of the pumpkin–I continued trimming.

There were no signs of blight anywhere, just some yellowing lower leaves.

When my husband started digging in the dirt for potatoes, I took over the drone, and hovered it above him.

I barely know how to control the thing, so I only fly it in the garden and at low altitudes like this.

The first bed took a bit longer because he had to be careful with the salsify.

I left him to it, and returned to my tomatoes. The nasturtium was also growing into the tomatoes.

I decided to move the branches onto the path. Anything for better airflow…

I still didn’t know how to turn the camera on the drone. So I left it filming straight down.

The drone does not record sound, by the way, so the bird song you are hearing is from my other camera.

Did anyone notice I stopped using background music?

I gave the nasturtium a tiny trellis to climb up onto. Little did I know I’d be killing this plant soon.

This particular rescue mission did not work out. It was still worth the try.

Did I mention there are ants all over the garden?

My husband was making progress on the harvest. He harvested about 10 kilograms of Queen Anne from bed 1.

Once the royalty is out of the bed, I’ll plant more carrots and parsnip next to the salsify.

The first bag was almost full, so I went to grab another one while he kept digging.

When I returned, he’d moved on to the next bed and was digging up King Edward–more royalty.

When I dug these, my neighbors asked who I’d buried. I told them I’d buried kings and queens.

Over the next few very wet days, the tomatoes started to look worse and worse.

I know it is unlikely but it feels like I started the blight by trying to prevent it.

It is much more likely that my rescue mission came too late and the blight was already in the plants.

I returned to find them rotting away. Considering all the rain, I was surprised they’d lasted this long.

All the fruit I’d looked forward to harvesting were turning brown and disgusting.

Some looked promising but had spots just the same. My tomatoes were dying.

The tomatoes were looking horrible. But I also spotted a pest on the nasturtium.

Unwilling to have more things spread, I pulled the entire plant. It was covered in spots.

Branch after branch was trimmed off the tomato plants and added to the pile. There were brown spots everywhere.

Some plants were looking better. Others had to be removed almost completely.

It was heartbreaking work to chop them down.

Those are my tomatoes. I just chopped down almost all of my tomatoes and I don’t know if what’s left is gonna be able to recover because we’ve got blight in there and it’s looking horrible.

The Zuckertraube is doing well. Pepper harvested some of it, I harvested some of it, but most of the others, there are brown spots all over the stems and some of the tomatoes are already brown.

So yeah, there’s so much noise going on. I’m just gonna…

When I was done for the day, the tomatoes were looking sad–and I was ready to curl into a ball and cry.

Which is pretty much what I did. I went home to have my husband cheer me up. I needed comfort.

Fast forward to a good week later, and there was hope. The tomatoes in the greenhouse were looking great.

There were even the first red fruit on one of the plants.

But more excitingly, the outdoor plants were recovering. Let’s have a look.

Okay, I just did what I hope to be the final culling of these tomatoes and they look like absolute crap.

I mean, if you look down there, there is dead tomatoes, brown tomatoes everywhere.

And even the parts that are recovering, there’s still a lot of… look at my hands, they’re all… this is all tomato.

But there is no growth on all of them and I think they might make it.

So assuming that the weather doesn’t go completely wet again for the next few weeks, they’re gonna make it.

And that gives me a lot of hope.And, the rest of the garden is looking amazing.

I’ll give you a garden tour one of these days for, well, I guess August, I guess we skipped the July tour, but I will.

But this one was supposed to be about the tomatoes and I just wanted to leave you with a happier note.

I think all of them are gonna make it.

I won’t get as many tomatoes as I had hoped, but there will be tomatoes and I think the plants will recover at least a little bit.

Keep your fingers crossed that we’re gonna get some drier weather and that it’s not gonna go back to all rain, because then I might have saved my tomatoes.

So long, and thanks for being here.