The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Sweet corn and tomatoes

Young sweet corn

We've eaten our way through 2.5 plantings of sweet corn, with three plantings left to mature before the frost. The final beds are right outside our front door, so I walk by them multiple times a day and watch their growth the way you'd watch sand slip through an hourglass. The first freeze seems remarkably close when measured by the height of sweet corn!

Blighted tomatoes

Elsewhere in the garden, I'm also shifting gears with winter in mind. A week ago, my gut said that it was time to stop pruning the tomatoes because blight had spread so much that I had to remove every leaf if I wanted to eradicate all signs of the problematic fungi. It turns out that was a good call --- even with blight (mostly septoria leaf spot) throughout the plants' foliage, our plants matured more tomatoes than the previous week due to their extra leaf area. It looks like we'll reach quota on soup this year after all. Phew!



Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.






profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.