I'm not sure exactly what happened, but the tomatoes and delecata have been yellowing, wilting, and dying the past week. Harvesting some tomatoes, but yield was crushed by the lack of sun/heat in July and all that rain. Inconsistent daytime temp swings that go from 70s and raining to a few days in the mid 90s followed by more rain and tennis in the 70s. Definitely the most challenging growing season I've dealt with.
Harvested some tomatoes and strawberries this morning.
These are from the Ozark everbearing strawberry that I planted in April along with a June bearing variety called Sequoia. Both had their first set of flowers plucked, but I let the Ozark go so the kids could enjoy a small harvest. The Sequoia plants (foreground) are so much more robust after concentrating efforts on vegging instead of fruiting.
I am losing a bunch of berries to some kind of pest. The pile in the ground is just from this morning. Before the fruit fully ripens, something is eating away at it in small amounts that just leaves the berry bruised and damaged. I did see a worm/caterpillar this morning. Going to soak the berries in something, maybe salt water (?), to see what crawls out and then plan an IPM moving forward.
The whole family had a great time harvesting potatoes. We took down 5 bags, mix of the three varieties planted. Not the best harvest out of these, but enough for a few different meals so far. I think the huckleberry gold will make some good German potato salad along with our onions.
Still have 10 bags that need to be harvested. The plants have died off at this point and they will get cut down today. I want to dry out the soil after another heavy soaking earlier this week. Likely to harvest in the cooler weather next week.