July 22nd 2010 Newsletter:
Hello friends,
It has been a roller coaster kind of week over here at Next Barn Over.
Many of you probably remember that most of the tomato crop in the Northeast was wiped out by late blight last year. We, together with farmers around the region, have been on high alert for any sign of disease fearing that the same thing might happen this year. The weather had been better this season, with drier days that generally discourage disease. Still, the humidity has been very high causing longer periods of dampness on the plants. Though cases of late blight have been discovered in Connecticut and New York, as of last week none had been found in Massachusetts. You may have noticed how healthy our tomato plants have been looking and we were getting excited for the first harvest.
We discovered some of the spotted leaves over the weekend and had them tested at the lab at the beginning of the week. Unfortunately our suspicious were corroborated and we received the sad distinction of being the first confirmed case of late blight in Massachusetts.
Our u-pick field seems to have been the hardest hit, and we don’t expect any of those plants to make it. In our main tomato field, a little ways up the road, we have culled out about a quarter of the field. We have been in close contact with other farmers in our community, alerting them of the news and working with them to try and prevent further spread.
We are sorry if some of you have heard about this from the local media before hearing it from us... things have been a little bit of a whirlwind and we are balancing the regular busy July field work with this latest news.
We will be writing you again in a few days to tell you more specifics about the situation and about how things look in the fields.
We are feeling very lucky right now that we are not a one crop farm which could easily be wiped out by something like this, and grateful for the CSA model that allows us to weather storms like this one.
Best,
-Tory and Ray, on behalf of the NBO crew
in the news:
The blight is back: Tomato disease that crushed Valley crops last year returns for another round -Daily Hampshire Gazette