Hurricane cleanup

It is a week since Irene came to visit. Fortunately the Grow Camp survived the high winds.  We had two trees downed in the yard, but they fell between the house and the shed, and caused no other damage.  The squash and cucumber plants did not survive.  At first we propped up the tomato plants that fell, but after a week we realized that the cherry tomato plant was too damaged to survive. Today I picked all the cherry tomatoes and pulled up the remnants of the plant.  Where the tomato plant was and where the squash and cucumber plants were, I stirred in a goodly amount of compost and planted with more fall crops.  I'm not sure we will have peas and beans before the first frost, but I do have copious amounts of floating row cover I can use to protect the plants.  It will be a race against time!

The Grow Camp was taken over by the two remaining tomato plants, but after Irene the leaves quickly started turning yellow and spotty. Today I trimmed out masses of yellow leaves and tomato branches.  As a result I had to pick quite a few green tomatoes.  There were quite a few tomatoes on top of the soil as a result of the hurricane, and I picked those up to make sauce.  I think we'll have tomatoes for at least a couple more weeks provided the trimming I did today solved the black spot problem.   I also removed all of the bush bean plants from the Grow Camp. We had a reasonable harvest, but the plants were flattened by the heavy rains, and few leaves remained.

All of this plant removal has left room to plant more peas, beans, lettuce, spinach, turnips, and some herbs.  I hope to plant more spinach and lettuce once the tomatoes are removed. We'll see how far into the cool weather we can harvest greens.

I should add that we have had a nice supply of eggplants and peppers up until the storm.  Many eggplants and peppers ended up on the ground after the storm, but more are coming along.   The chard is bounteous!  More chard tonight with our salmon and corn.