Wow…another post about a pest, of sorts.  Though this, like blight, is actually another plant disease.

Here at my house my roommates and I have a small, messy garden.  I say messy because we crammed a lot of plants into a small space and they are doing aggressively well.  Certainly not a terrible problem to have, but everyday I have to go out and yell at the cucumbers to stop climbing up the tomato plants and for the Zucchini to stop shading the eggplants with its massive leaves.

The two squash plants (aforementioned Zucchini of an unnamed variety and Zephyr summer squash) are two of the most impressive, productive squash plants I’ve ever seen.  They are keeping the three of us- though one doesn’t cook, so I guess the two of us- in enough squash to choke a hog.  I love it!

But just moments ago I went outside to pick some and I noticed that the plants are absolutely covered with powdery mildew!  It came out of nowhere!  I didn’t notice it yesterday (hell, even this morning in my ritual glimpse I didn’t see anything!) so it’s come on quick and dirty.  Yikes!

I’ve never dealt with this before.  Will it spread to the other plants that are around it?  The tomatoes are literally touching the squash plants- are they in danger of catching it too?  I’m not sure what to do?  Anyone ever had a problem with powdery mildew in the past?

Well, it’s happened.  My potatoes have been struck all to hell by late blight.

I’ve been watching them with consternation for a few weeks now…hoping hoping hoping that those little brown spots I was seeing weren’t blight.  Silly me.  I should have chopped them all down right then.

I went out of town last weekend, so almost a week went by without a stop to the garden.  On Thursday I sped by after work (note to self:  keep some better shoes in your car…traipsing up a hill that is a foot deep in thick weeds in your heels is a terrible, terrible idea) and saw that my potatoes were wrecked.  Oddly enough, it seemed to be creeping up the patch.  I have two long rows, and the vines at one end were rotted and blackened while the ones at the other ends were still green and strong, just showing lots of spots. I figured it would hit them all at once…guess not.

I’ve read a couple of sources online that say if you cut down your vines, not leaving any green, and let the potatoes sit for at least two weeks in the ground, you can dig up the tubers and it will lessen the chance that the blight actually gets on the potatoes. So today I went by the farm and cut them all down, leaving only little nubs sticking up so I know where the plants were growing.  I stuffed all the vines in a old feed bag and gave it to the farm managers.  They are going to see that they get incinerated.

Shockingly, none of the tomatoes at the farm seem to have even a touch of it (they don’t grow any potatoes, so that isn’t an issue).  Almost every farm around us is reporting that they are getting hit hard- many of them have lost their entire crops.  But today we picked a few handfuls of early cherry and plum tomatoes off of perfectly green, healthy plants.  My little plot is on an isolated hillside with a forest between it and any other plants of the nightshade family.  Keep your fingers crossed.  I could personally care less about the whole tomato crop being wiped out, but it would break the hearts of most of the people who belong to the CSA, so I’ll hope for the best.

I’m staying home from work today with a lingering flu-like thing so I was luxuriating in the glory of Golden Girls on Lifetime.  (Picture it:  Sicily 1922…I was home from the vineyard with a Miasma…)  During a  commercial break, I saw one that was unnerving to me.  A man and a woman are sitting on a picnic blanket in a park.  She offers him a bite of a cherry-red Popsicle and he says to her, “I thought you loved me…that has high fructose corn syrup in it.”  She asks him what is so bad about HFCS and he stammers while he tries to name something wrong with it.  She finishes his thought by saying, “what?  That is has the same calories as sugar and no proven health dangers?”  (I’m paraphrasing here, I don’t remember it word-for-word).  Then he quips, “You only brought one?”  The commercial ends with a link to a website called sweet surprise or something like that and states that it was paid for by the Corn Refiners Association.

Corn Syrup, and especially High Fructose, is in a shocking amount of processed food.  Many of them, like ketchup and bread, that you would never expect.  Most sodas and “fruit” juices are almost entirely water and HFCS, and it is found in almost every cookie, dessert, and sweetened cereal in the grocery store.  There are a lot of signs that it’s very bad for you, and indeed diabetes and obesity have climbed to harrowing numbers ever since it was introduced in the 1970s.  Admittedly, none of these issues have ever been linked directly and unequivocally to HFCS, but there is clearly a connection.

The fact is, it isn’t good for you and we are consuming it in very, very large amounts.  It isn’t an innocuous ingredient.

Here are a couple of articles about the problems with HFCS:

One, about the environmental impact of a country consuming millions of gallons of the stuff and one about the move to eliminate an unhealthy additive to our collective diets.

(Full Disclosure:  As I’m writing this, I’m drinking a 7UP that of course contains HFCS.  I don’t drink soda frequently, but it makes my tummy feel better.   I’m not saying that we should be giving it up 100%- though I’d like to- I just don’t want people to see propaganda while they are watching Golden Girls and think that it isn’t something that they should be concerned about.)