Pepper Plenty, Potato Pestilence

Today's haul of green chiles, with a few tomatoes and a zuke and cuke.

It looks like a good pepper crop this year. The hot peppers are producing an abundance, and the sweet peppers are loaded.


Not so fortunate with the potatoes however. It looks as if Potato blight has attacked the entire crop. It has been very fast moving, and at first I thought it was due to the potato beetles. Its too late now to save the plants. There is nothing to do at this point but cut down all the plants and get rid of the diseased foliage.   Then, the recommendation is to wait 3 weeks before attempting to dig up any tubers... to hopefully give the offending organism time to die off in the surface of the soil. This means my potato crop will be nill to very small.  This is the same disease that caused the Irish Potato famine back in the late 1800s.

Its too bad, as  three of my main storage crops -potatoes, winter squash, and the flint corn-have all been very hard hit by either insects or other problems, and I will see only very small returns this year.