My Mom's Vegetable Garden Has Late Blight

On the way to New York for our East Coast Tour, Dorothee and I stopped off at my parents' house in East Aurora, NY, where we were met with one of the season's most unpleasant surprises: My mom's tomatoes have late blight. I had known that Thorpe's Organic Family Farm -- the nearby farm where we filmed our 'What's a CSA?' video -- had late blight, but for some reason I never expected my parents' vegetable garden to get it.

Compared to a family farm, where the tomato harvest represents most of profit a farm might make in a year, my mom's loss is no big deal. But for us, it's sort of traumatizing to see all of those juicy tomatoes rotting on the vine.

The garden is big, with about a dozen long raised beds and a large blueberry patch. Usually, my parents live off its bounty in the summer, for the most part, and they dehydrate, freeze and can what can't be eaten in the summer. This year, it's difficult to accept that my mom won't be canning tomatoes.

Here's what the garden looked like in early August, when my dad took some photos of it:

And here's how it looks now:

-Mark