This year, instead of planting the upwards of 100 tomato plants that I've done in the past, I planted about 40. I paid very little attention to them, sprayed with copper spray (which helps prevent blight) only 2 or 3 times all summer when I should have probably been doing it every 10 days or two weeks, and only trimmed the plants occasionally. I really let the garden do it's own thing - with the exception of a few concentrated days of weeding mid-summer. I didn't water very often because we had some rain and I just wasn't into it. And when I did water, I'm ashamed to say I didn't take it out of the rain barrel, but used the sprinkler.
By all accounts, I should have had overgrown plants with very few tomatoes, blossom end rot and blight. They were kind of overgrown, but no blossom end rot (which is caused by inconsistent watering) at all and very little blight (a few, but so far, not too bad. I could still end up with a lot of blight - a couple of years ago most of my tomato crop to blight after they were all picked. I estimated about 200 pounds worth. So I'm not counting that out yet, but I do have a few tomatoes to deal with:
I'm thinking I'll have to make tomato sauce this year - and maybe green tomato pickles (although I really don't enjoy eating pickled things at all). I've already canned about 30 jars of just tomatoes!
Any other suggestions?
We also got lots of potatoes, carrots and onions this year. Not so many peas. Maybe I'll blog about that one next.
