The first harvest of the white Silver Queen corn took place yesterday (very tasty!!), with many more ears to harvest over the next few weeks. Harvest continues on the pole beans and broccoli side shoots. The last of the spring planted cabbage and kohlrabi was also harvested over the last week. The first few early jalapeno peppers were also harvested with many more continuing to ripen up on the plants. The cucumber harvest continues and I was able to put up ten jars of refrigerator pickles recently. The Scarlet Nantes carrot seeds were sown on July 23rd and most of them have germinated within the last day or so. Derby bush green beans were sown around the middle of July where the spring peas were growing and another planting of these beans were sown on July 25th where the spring onions were growing. About a week ago the dried and cured yellow Candy onions were placed in mesh bags and moved to the basement for long term storage. The harvest from these were pretty good, but maybe not as good as last year. The Roma tomatoes started out this spring looking pretty good, but the early blight has taken hold and they now look awful (see pic below). In the end, the very wet spring was there undoing. The last several years I have had really good tomato harvests, but not this year. I am currently researching determinate plum tomato varieties that have good disease resistance. I will not be planting Roma tomatoes going forward, as they have little to no early blight disease resistance. I am also battling disease on my celery (variety Tango). I have now come to the conclusion that my issue has not been “black heart” disease (which I thought I have had over the past few years now), but rather Celery Anthracnose or Leaf Curl Disease (see pic below). See the following good description of this from Cornell University: https://www.vegetables.cornell.edu/pest-management/disease-factsheets/celery-anthracnose-leaf-curl-disease/ Even though I have been practicing a four-year crop rotation, I still have been having this issue. My guess is that I need to make sure to discard all parts of the plants, including leaves, and not let them get into my compost bins. I am currently researching some “least susceptible varieties” of celery. Some might say why bother, but if you never had truly fresh celery right from your garden, then you are missing out. I plan on getting some lettuce, cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower seedlings planted out into the garden in about another week or so. I still need to harvest the rest of potatoes in the two 4ft-4ft raised beds, which I will do within the next week.

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