Problems in my Summer Garden. Probleme en pyne in my Somertuin

Sometimes inexperience isn't the only cause for concern in my backyard garden. No, the elements can also take its toll. I planted various beans, including Lazy Housewife and Contender, mid-August and direct sowed an assortment of tomatoes the end of September. Normally these planting/sowing times would be ideal, but last year Spring we had an unusually high rainfall. Followed by an extremely wet January. Yes, we measured 165mm of rain in only the five days between 5 and 10 January 2014. Any gardener knows excess humidity causes one of the most dreaded plant diseases...

BLIGHT!!! ROES!!!

I never knew there were so many different types of blight and that some of the types were more disastrous than others. According to the sources I studied I luckily had a case of early blight in my garden. Okay, maybe no blight can be called "lucky", but at least the early type still meant some sort of harvest, whereas late blight kills a plant outright. The symptoms of early blight are discolored foliage - first yellow and then brown spots, forming concentric patterns, with no 'mould' underneath the leave. It mostly affects the leaves, and the same type of vegetables shouldn't be planted in that area for three years. Late blight attacks a whole plant, makes the fruit rot and has the mouldy stuff underneath the leaves.

As is the case with any type of blight, it is better to simply pull up the whole plant and destroy it. Do not compost! I simply couldn't get that over my heart. After all the months of nurture, watering, sweating, and this...

Dr Carolyn tomatoes/Dr Carolyn geel tamatietjies

Brandywine Sudduths tomato/Brandywine Vleestamatie

The butternuts are probably the biggest disappointment so far. Even though I used organic Waltham seed and planted a borage between the squashes to encourage bees (and oh, were they encouraged!) the little butternuts would all fall off when they were about 5cm big. I also added piles of compost. All to no avail. Then the rains came... shortly followed by an explosion of white powdery mildew. I was fed-up; I wanted to pull the whole lot out. Then the mother showed me this:

A little one, but a butternut nonetheless/My eie botterskorsie; eie en enigste sover

Safe to say that the butternuts are all still in the ground. Covered with mildew, but still producing little squashes. I might be a pessimist at times, but that doesn't stop me from hoping one or two of them will survive, like the little sucker in the photo.

What are your biggest concerns in your garden at the moment?