Prior to my vacation, I picked as much of my garden as I could, and staked up my tomatoes as high as possible.  I weeded, and looked at the garden with some satisfaction.  The tomatoes were only just starting: with any luck, I would have some nice red ones upon my return from camping in the north.  If only the days would bring some summer heat.

The one sad spot was that my potatoes were inexplicably stricken.  I am growing them for the first time ever, and have put them in a 2'x2' container that I fill with dirt as they grow.  A couple of weeks ago I had put on the last boards of the container, and now I was noticing that one of the four plants was dying.  I could see no insects: this was a rather severe wilt of leaf and stem.  I wondered if there was something nasty in the soil that I had filled up with last time -- I had taken a bagful of soil from my mother-in-law's old tree nursery, which 30 years later is pretty much now a young forest floor.  I coated the plants with neem oil as often as I dared, but on the eve of leaving, a couple of the other plants were starting to show signs of infection.

Now that I am home, the potato blight -- the same disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s -- had destroyed my potato crop, and it had also infected almost the entire row of tomatoes along the backyard fence-line.

I can't begin to describe how disheartening this is!  Even when I was a half-assed, inattentive gardener, I could grow a few measly tomatoes in my backyard.  This year I really tried!  and I planted 'way more than usual, and my yield will be far, far less.

I am not alone: in the paper today is a small sidebar: "Blight Hits Local Spud Crop" -- because it has been unnaturally wet and cold this summer, farmers have been diligent in spraying with fungicides.  Those who were diligent are going to get a crop, the rest of us will get disappointment.  Now I have a choice: do I buy potatoes and tomatoes with fungicides that have protected them, or do I do without these dietary staples?

The goal of self-sufficiency seems so much further away now than it ever did, even though on our vacation we cheerfully discussed getting a few chickens for home-grown eggs.

So disheartened was I upon seeing the mess in my backyard, I was not at all cheered by the size of the spaghetti squash, or the huge bean yield, or the fennel and the brussel sprouts and broccoli that have come on so strong.

Good thing I picked a bunch of St. John's Wort while on vacation, and made tinctures of it, to combat my depression.  I'll probably need a gallon of it, not just the half a ml. that I made.

Some of my ancestors came to Canada to escape "the first famine, wearing all that they owned" (in the words of Stan Rogers).  The potato blight did not defeat them, but it did cause them to move.  Will it move me from my desire to grow my garden organically?