Early blight on tomatoes
The
good news is that closer inspection of our tomatoes shows they are
infected with early blight, not late blight. Notice the yellowing
of the leaves and (not pictured) the absence of problems on the stems
and fruits. Although both are fungal diseases, early blight tends
to be less devastating, and I'm having very good luck keeping the
fungus in check with my
blight control measures.
The bad news is that
early blight tends to stick around after it shows up. Unlike late
blight, which needs living tissue to survive, early blight can
overwinter in plant debris or even in saved seeds. Although it
pains me to remove biomass from the farm, we'll continue to take our
blighted leaves to the dump.
This week, I ripped out
another three tomato plants that showed too much damage to save.
But I can't complain, since the tomatoes have been pouring in.
Here's our August 6 harvest:
Then skip ahead a few
days to August 10, and you'll notice I had to upgrade to the bigger
basket:
No photos of the next
few harvests, but suffice it to say that I'm now harvesting large
masses of tomatoes three times a week. We've already frozen a
gallon of pizza sauce and three quarts each of spaghetti sauce and
tomato-based vegetable soup. When the peach
leather comes out of
the automotive dehydrator today, I plan to replace the fruit with a
batch of sun-dried tomatoes.
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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.
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Why put the bio mass in the dump? If it not desirable for compost, how about bio char or ash. You could put it in a container ( a large one ) with any waste that is the least bit flammable, light it then smother it like you're making charcoal, or just burn it and everything else you are going to dump and till in the ashes.
I know you said you took a years worth of waste to the dump recently, but was it all really waste? Much of the plastic that things are packaged in now is actually made from wood and alcohol so it can be used if you have the time and energy to make it usable, or as above put it in the container and make char or ashes of it.
Maybe this will light that bulb above your thinking cap. LOL
I'm far from the best recycler but if you look at anything involving Ed Begly, Jr. you see how much people throw away without thinking, and still believe they are doing their part to recycle or reuse.