Life Through My Eyes: Jun 30, 2017

Just when you think things are looking good and you are going to have some really good crops to harvest...a funny thing happened on the way to the Farmers Market so to speak. Where to start...I developed a strange fungus or something on almost all of my pepper plants where the leaves were either changing color, burning out, having assorted style holes being bit through them and or the leaves just dropping off the plant at the stem. It could be a mix or match of one or all of the aforementioned maladies but all with the same ending....leaves falling off right and left. Now some of the pepper plants have numerous healthy peppers prospering on the plant while some might have just one lone pepper and a few with no peppers at all and by the looks of the plants not much of a chance of producing a pepper at all. I have had to spread the plants out away from each other while putting some of the worst plants in quarantine so to speak. I have used insecticide and fungicide numerous times all with no results at all. I even had leaf samples sent in to my local horticultural unit to see if they can determine the culprit hopefully before all of these plants die out. And just to be on the safe side so that I would at least have some type of pepper crop this season, I bought 9 new pepper plants which have been placed away from the "bad" plants.
So far the carrot plants and tomato plants are doing well.
And then there is the corn crop which by all appearances looked so promising. I have to take total blame for this one. After last years good crop I went a little overboard in my attempts to make this years crop a fantastic one. Unfortunately I planted the corn a little to close together and it was stunting the growth of the ears. I made a command decision to pull out all of the corn stalks and salvage whatever ears that I could...I think I got about 3 dozen smaller sized ears. I then turned around and re-planted 3 varieties in such a way that there is plenty of space for the corn to breath and grow. The 3 varieties that I chose were ones that had a 70-75 day maturation time period.
So there you have it. Even with all of the on going challenges, I am still hoping for a good harvest this year.
Almost forgot to mention. I re-planted the corn 3 days ago and I already have 16 popping through the soil. They like it when the ground warms up. Mix that with some water and voila...
Here are some photos....the good and the bad but the still producing:

Below is a perfect example of one of my injured pepper plants...no leaves on the lower section and this one has one lone pepper and it will most likely be the only one this plant will produce

Healthy tomato plants below

More injured pepper plants but with some peppers on them

On some of these pepper plants you might be able to see some of the leaf damage although I try to keep the bad leaves picked of but they keep coming back

Healthy tomato plant

Some of the new pepper plants to shore up the seasons harvest

These carrots are getting close just letting them sweeten up just a bit more...they are supposed to be a rather sweet variety

Healthy tomato plant

Quarantined pepper plants. You can see how the leaves on the lower half have all fallen off. These plants should be prolific pepper producers but whatever got a hold of them got them good and wont let go