Yellowing Leaves

After last year's experience with the Box Car Willie tomato plant that developed Fusarium Wilt, which led to the premature death of the plant, Cindy decided to conduct an experiment by grafting a Box Car Willie plant to disease-resistant root stock.

Although the ungrafted plant produced the first green tomato, that plant was the first to start showing signs of disease in the form of yellowing leaves at the base of the plant.

A few days later, the grafted Box Car Willie plant also started showing some yellowing of the lower leaves, and so did most of the other tomatoes.

Upon closer inspection, it appeared that most of the yellowing and leaf wilt was due to powdery mildew, probably caused by the high temperatures and very dry, Santa Ana winds we had a couple of weeks ago.  Cindy had put up cloth panels to protect the plants from the sun and heat, but not much could be done to protect them from the drying wind.

She has now removed the diseased leaves and sprayed the plants with neem oil, a fungicide that should prevent the spread of the powdery mildew spores.

The disease-resistant root stock on the grafted Box Car Willie plant should help it survive this, but we're still not sure about the ungrafted plant.

Vegetable Mosaic

Cindy planted a cover crop a few months ago to enrich the soil in several of the raised beds; she always chops it down when the plants mature and folds the plant matter into the soil to add nitrogen and other nutrients.

Swiss Chard

Recently she decided to take out most of the Swiss Chard, and then recycled the stems into one of the cover crop beds, creating a very beautiful vegetable mosaic.

I'd love to be able to make a glass bead with these colors on it, but to do so I would probably have to use a soda lime glass known as EDP, aka Evil Devitrifying Purple.  It's a beautiful color, but unless you know how to treat it exactly right, it will devitrify like mad and leave rough spots in your finished bead instead of the normal smooth, glossy surface you expect a glass bead to have.  I guess I just haven't learned the proper way to deal with it.

Too bad, I really like these colors together.

Good News/Bad News

The good news is that Fortress Blueberry is doing a wonderful job of protecting our blueberry bushes; they seem to be loving it and they are producing a huge crop of blueberries.

The bad news is that the potato plants apparently really hate this arrangement, because the leaves have all turned yellow and the plants appear to be dying.

Potatoes Not Loving It Here

It may have been a mistake to reverse the structure of the anti-varmint panels, putting the plexiglass panel on the bottom and the hardware cloth on the top.  Since the potatoes are cool-weather plants, they may have been getting too warm with the sun coming in through the plexiglass and with not much air circulation at that level.

Not good news for the potatoes, although we did have some good Russets for dinner the other night.

First Tomato--Which Willie?

Cindy found the first tomato of the year, and it was on one of the two Box Car Willie plants.

Which plant?  Drum roll, please....the ungrafted plant.

The grafted plant, on the right in this picture, is about four or five inches taller than the ungrafted one on the left, but while it has been putting its energy into very healthy looking leaves and stems, the ungrafted plant has started putting out tomatoes.   Maybe a little competition here?

It's going to be interesting to follow this experiment.

Snakes And Ladders

We came home this afternoon and were getting out of the car, when we noticed a large snake undulating down our front steps and into our driveway.  At 56.5 inches long, it was a pretty sizable snake.

We stood a cautious distance away until we could make sure it wasn't a Western Rattlesnake (Crotalus oreganus), but soon identified it as a San Diego Gopher Snake, Pituophis catenifer annectens.  Gopher Snakes are sometimes mistakenly identified as rattlesnakes, partly because their camouflage patten resembles that of the rattlesnake, but also partly because the Gopher Snake sometimes reacts defensively by hissing and shaking its tail when threatened.  This may cause other critters to back off and leave the snake alone, but humans often just kill them without looking for the differences.  Rattlers have a triangular-shaped head, tend to be fatter and have a blunt tail with or without rattles.  Non-venomous Gopher Snakes have a head that is barely distinguishable from the body, tend to be thinner and have a long, narrow tail that tapers to a point.

We watched this snake slither down our driveway along the wall and decided to see where it went; it may not be venomous, but it's still a surprise to come upon a snake this size without warning.

We thought it would probably go behind our trash bins and hang out for a while, but it went right up over a piece of wood along our wall.

I moved a piece of scrap metal to form a bridge up the wall; the snake deliberated for a bit, apparently trying to decide whether it wanted to trust the metal piece, but soon went up the metal bridge and onto the top of the wall.

Then the rest of its body followed and we were able to get a good look at the pattern of its scales.  It's easy to see how people could mistake the relatively circular pattern of the Gopher Snake's scales for the diamonds of the Western Rattler.

And eventually the tip of its tail followed it over the wall.

I ran next door to let the neighbors know the snake was in their yard so they wouldn't be surprised and kill it.  It turned out that, far from being freaked out by the snake, they were delighted to learn that it would probably slowly take out their gopher population.

It may have found a happy home ground, at least for as long as the gophers last.  Then it can start on our California Ground Squirrels.

But Is It Art?

Cindy rigged up these shade cloth panels to give the newly transplanted tomato plants and the Swiss Chard some relief from the sun and the heat we've been experiencing for most of the last week.

Shade Cloth Around the Tomatoes

She was afraid the 90 degree heat and the hot, dry Santa Ana winds would be too much for the plants at this stage in their development, so she draped this cloth to protect them.

This stretch of fabric reminded me of an installation done by Christo in Marin County in the 1970s called Running Fence, which was a huge fabric fence consisting of 2,050 fabric panels 18 feet high that covered about 24 miles of land, running over the rolling hills in western Marin County.

The Running Fence was a temporary installation that was long gone when I moved to Marin County; it was never intended to be permanent and had no practical purpose whatsoever.  The project required over 2 million square feet of woven nylon fabric and a 450 page environmental impact report.

I heard from people who had lived there at the time that, although there was considerable opposition to the project initially, when it was completed they found it to be strangely beautiful.

Do You Think We'll Have Enough?

Do you think we'll have enough tomatoes this year?

2014 Tomato Plants

These plants are in addition to the two Box Car Willie plants in one of the other raised beds, and to the Husky Cherry tomato plant in a grow bag beside Fortress Blueberry.

Husky Cherry Tomato

I think we're going to have PLENTY of tomatoes this season.  Good thing we really like tomatoes.