Day 4, Mourning the Tomato Plants

For breakfast this morning, my parents enjoyed some of the blueberry muffins I made yesterday. I wasn't feeling well, so I just ate the last of the yogurt we bought at Farmers and Artisans and two carrots from our CSA share.

For lunch, we had homemade salsa and organic blue corn chips bought at the Lexington Food Co-op. The tomatoes were homegrown, the sunflower seed oil (in place of olive oil) was bought at Farmers and Artisans, and the Italian peppers, jalepeno peppers, and onions were from our Thorpes CSA share. The chips obviously weren't local. However, the Locavore Challenge allows you to choose five non-local items that you can continue to consume throughout the month of September, known as Wild Card Items.

My dad's Wild Card Items are 1. fair-trade coffee, 2. peanuts, 3. lime, 4. tortilla chips, and 5. all-purpose flour. My mom's are 1. fair-trade tea, 2. granulated sugar, 3. lime, 4. tortilla chips, and 5. all-purpose flour. Mine are 1. lime, 2. tortilla chips, and 3. all-purpose flour. I haven't chose a forth and fifth Wild Card Item because I can't seem to come up with anything else non-local that I just can't live without for a month.

Dinner was simple, just boiled potatoes from our CSA share, boiled green beens from our CSA share, local corn on the cob, and some of my homemade whole wheat rolls. All this was served with milk and butter bought at Farmers and Artisans.

It was a bit of a sad day. Since Sunday, I've realized that formerly glorious tomatoes were being killed by something. I've been going out every day and snapping off dying leaves and stems, trying to little avail to save the healthy part of the plants. Today while we were in the garden together, my dad and I decided that the problem was probably late blight, though I'm going to bring part of a blighted plant to our local Cornell Cooperative Extension office on Tuesday to see if anyone can tell me if I've diagnosed the problem correctly.

Anyways, we broke and snipped so many sickened parts of my tomato plants today, and I even ended pulling out out a practically dead plant. The sight that we were left was rather pathetic. Just three weeks ago my dad and I spent the some time catching up on some tying up of our tomato plants. The end result was "The Great Wall of Tomato". The Great Wall of Tomato is now just a shadow of its former self.

As my dad pointed out, the tomato plants probably only had another couple of weeks of bearing left, and we still should get most of the tomatoes we would have from the still-living plants. However, they were such vibrant, healthy plants, the joy of my garden, for so long. It breaks my heart to see them dying.