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We tend to forget that Christmas, as a religious holiday, replaced a much older pagan holiday honoring the winter solstice, the shortest day and the longest night of the year. While Christmas falls on the 25th of December, the true solstice falls on the 21st or 22nd.  The good news is, from this day forward, the days get increasingly longer and the nights increasingly shorter – certainly a reason to celebrate.

For me, Christmas signifies that it is time to start thinking about Springtime, and therefore, time to order seeds. Today, I placed on-line orders for a variety of vegetable seeds.  I ordered seeds for a variety of heirloom tomato varieties from TomatoFest, and seeds for other garden varieties from Territorial Seeds.
This year’s new heirloom tomato varieties will be:

Aunt Lucy’s Italian Paste
Azoychka
Burraker’s Favorite
Indische Fleish
Mom’s Paste
Nyagous
Riviera
San Marzano Redorta
Boxcar Willie
Carmello
Caspian Pink
Impulse
Mrs. Maxwell’s Big Italian
Paul Robeson
Sasha’s Altai

What a strange year!  A full two months after the last tomatoes gave up the fight, and a full month after the date of our average first killing frost, the pepper plants were still going strong, and I picked buckets of peppers like those shown in the picture.  Good that I did, because two days later the temperature is 14 degrees F.

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The last of my tomato plants suffered fatal blight infections on September 24.  I pulled out all of the plants over the week-end.  Thus came the end of a truly lousy year for tomato culture.  Reports are that this was the coolest summer in three decades – there were fewer days with temperatures over 70 degrees than in any summer since 1980.

Blight, a fungus disease that thrives under cool damp conditions, has just appeared on a few of my tomato plants.  Blight is the bane of Puget Sound tomato gardeners.  Based on past experience, I know that this infection will quickly spread among all the plants, so it is likely that I can expect only another week or so of tomato harvests. Blight spores carry over from year to the next in the soil, so limiting the exposure of plants to the soil, by growing tomatoes with black plastic film mulch, will delay infection.  This effect is very clear in my present garden, as the blight has appeared first on tomato vines that have wandered from the plastic-covered area onto the adjacent bare ground. Pulling out the infected plants as soon as the infection becomes apparent may slow the rate of spread a little, but nothing will stop the infection once it appears in the garden.  Sadly, tomatoes picked green from infected plants will themselves turn black from blight and rot, before they ripen.

Camp Joy is late for a cherry tomato, but it is very productive on riotous plants.

Bloody Butcher ripened early, with a moderately productive crop of golf ball sized fruit.

In this unusually cold summer, Marmande was the most successful of all 60 tomato varieties I planted.  It is very early and extremely productive.