We’re back to our normal rain dodging. For the past 3 days, there have been showers all around us and we didn’t get a single drop. Since we’re surrounded by 4 mountains, all the rain ends up on the mountains, and we get little to no rain. Now that we got no rain, and we’re back to watering the plants.

Although we got 10mm of rain 4 days ago, the soil is so dry and hard that there’s no way to sow anything, and the worst thing is there’s no rain forecasted for the next couple of weeks. Instead, we’ll most likely get another harsh heatwave.

The beds that I’ve dug a week ago are still completely dry. I’ve tried digging them again, but there’s no use in digging until we get proper rain. If things stay this way, I’ll sow the flowers to the pots and transplant them later to the beds. Sowing in these conditions makes no sense.

Even though there’s been no rain this didn’t stop the late blight. It kept on spreading to the other tomatoes and again instead of path cleaning I’ve been removing the tomato leaves on the other 2 tomato beds.

These beds are more on the shaded part of the garden, and the plants are visibly smaller than the rest of the plants. The colder soil in May probably stopped their growth. Still, this didn’t make the blight spread faster. Since they are planted in a narrow row they are still quite healthy, and only the edge tomatoes are really sick. The rest are healthy for now. Next year I will plant all the tomatoes on the sunny side, the ones here are healthy, but almost 50 days behind the rest of the tomatoes.

Surprisingly one of the completely healthy tomatoes is my late and poor seedlings. Even though I threw most of my bad seedlings away, I did keep a few better ones as an experiment. And surely they are the smallest of them all, falling behind all the other plants, but they are healthy.

Although they are very early varieties, they are just starting to flower, and it seems I will have time for one fruit harvest until September. This encouraged, even more, my decision to sow again my tomatoes. I really miss my different colored tomatoes, and no matter how bad the year gets, I always have at least one harvest.