Gardening & Google Voice

Well, my garden is doing… OK now, I guess. At least half of my peppers have died – all the bells, 10/12 jalapenos, 8/12 hungarian hot, all the rio grand hot, and a rather random selection of others. But, those that have survived are looking pretty good. So, hopefully we get some peppers, though I’m definetly going to have to buy jalapenos to pickle like I did last year.

Unfortunately though, my cucumbers & zucchini appear to be doing the same thing as my peppers. They all looked absolutely awful on Monday when we got back from Findlay. Right before we left I sprayed them pretty good with peroxide & spread my remaining cornmeal around on them, and I think it *might* have helped as some of them are looking like the might survive. Though they still look pretty awful. But we’ve gotten a handful of zucchini (like.. 5 or 6 now), and I think we *might* get some more. And I got one nice lil cucumbuer the other day too, and theres a few more that look like they *might* keep growing and get slightly bigger than 3 or 4″.

And then today I went ahead and pulled out all of my peas, broccoli & onions. The peas were definetly dead, and I’ve just been highly disgusted with how they’ve done – I swear I got more broccoli from 6 plants last year than I did all 40 odd plants this year!! But, I did get quite a few nice onions from between my broccoli plants… Now I’m just trying to decide what I want to re-plant in those beds. I’m thinking I’m going to try and plant broccoli from seeds where my peas were and put peas & beans where the broccoli were. Who knows if I’ll actually get any peas/beans/broccoli, but its at least worth a try!!

On a totally, completely, utterly unrelated note, I got an invite (and then registerd) for Google Voice – which seems pretty darn cool. I can send text messages from my computer now (which is super cool since I normally can’t since I don’t have cell phone reception at home), and the fact that I can call anyone from home for free is also super cool. So yeah, go request an invite and try it out. It seems quite cool!!

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Cornmeal, Peroxide, Wilting Peppers & Tomatoe Blight!! – AAHH!!

So, about 2 weeks ago now, I hoed my peppers and the next day 2-4 suddenly started to wilt. This was very disturbing, but I figured that I must have just nicked there roots a bit too much, and went on watering like normal. A week later and another dozen or so were wilting. And so I really started googling. Apparently, there aren’t *too* many things that affect peppers (vs most other vegetables), and cause them to wilt. The two big ones being Fusarium and Verticillium wilts, both of which are caused by fungus’s. And both of which can, apparently be controlled (supposedly) by applying cornmeal to soil around the affected plants (and which also apparently helps keeps weeds down…). So, I hoed and mixed a whole bunch of cornmeal into my beds (probably 5-6# in 4 15-20′ long beds).

After continuing to google around about fungus wilts I read about spraying peroxide on affected plants (which apparently is also a fungicide – makes sense when you think about it, huh?), and so I went out and sprayed all my peppers (and most everything else except the tomatoes…) with peroxide yesterday. Now, it could just be my imagination, but I swear to you that today (2-3 days since applying cornmeal and 1-2 days since spraying with peroxide) that my plants which were unaffected look beautiful, and while some are definetly dead, the others look no worse than they did a few days ago, and possibly a bit better…

Of course, then today I hear about how late blight has been confirmed to be in OH (a major disease of potoatoes & tomatoes – apparently its what caused the famous irish potato famine back in the 1840s), and which is also apparently caused by a fungus of some sort. A couple of my tomatoe plants have suddenly started to look sickly in the past couple days, so I think tommorrow I’ll be spraying them & my peppers with peroxide really really well and then on Sunday I’ll have Kevin spray with the other spray we’ve been using for the last couple months.

So… we’ll see. I really hope that my remaing peppers survive and give us lots of peppers & that some of the sickly looking ones come back… and that my tomatoes don’t all succomb to late blight or powdery mildew, or something else!!