Rain rain, go away...

Every day I pop up to the garden to see if my highly coveted tomatoes have started to ripen. Last week, much to my surprise, I could see a little hint of red through the dense green. I was so excited that I ran into the garden and started pulling leaves back to take a closer look. In my excitement, one fell off the branch and hit the ground with a dispirited thud. I picked it up. From the top it appeared to be fine - but when I turned it over, there was a dark depression on the bottom, like an ugly, mouldy pockmark. I gasped. Of all the things that I wanted to work out in my garden,  the most important were the tomatoes. These were my San Marzano (Roma-esque) paste tomatoes and I had big plans for them.

After consulting the handy-dandy Encyclopaedia of Insects and Plant Diseases, I discovered that my tomatoes were suffering from blossom rot. Usually caused by drought, blossom rot can also occur after too much rain - and, there's been no shortage of that around here! While the roots of the plant rot slowly, water and nutrients find it more and more difficult to travel to the fruit. First the leaves start to die (turning yellow and spotted in the process) and then the fruit gets the dreaded spot, falls off and dies. And so my excitement turned to grave concern. I was mentally picturing fewer and fewer jars of delicious tomato sauce on my shelves. As you can well imagine, this has caused me great anxiety.

Unfortunately, there is nothing one can do about blossom rot, but beg the rain to stop and hope for the best.

This is my first time growing a garden of this calibre and all I really wanted were my own tomatoes... Rain rain, please go away. Don't even come back another day.