Rain and Greens

Rogue showers are plastering us with rain this evening.  It rains hard for 5 minutes and quits, waits 10 minutes, then does it again.  The water is good to help melt the pelletized fertilizer I applied last week, but not so good for the fungicide I sprayed on the tomato plants. 

We've had about a week without any rain, and the plants have begun to "green up."  I hope these showers move on and don't set the plants back again.

The green tomatoes have a malady.  Some of them are a strange rust color.  It looks like buckeye rot, but I'm not sure that's what it is.  Most of the descriptions say it happens to tomatoes that are on or near the soil, but the affected tomatoes are fairly high on the stem. 

Could it be that I bought a strange variety of tomato that is more brown/purple than red when ripe?  I don't recall buying any, but it's possible they were mislabeled.  Wouldn't it be a shame if I'm throwing away perfectly good tomatoes because they're a funny color?  It reminds me of a few years ago, when my brother was throwing away what he thought was diseased yellow squash when, in fact, they were perfectly good butternut squash.

My garden has about three rows that were tilled at the beginning of the season but haven't been touched since.  I'd saved those rows to plant more purple hull peas.  They're full of grass right now.  Last week, I started to run the tiller over them, but I noticed a fair amount of turnip greens. mustard greens, and kale thriving in the grass.  This afternoon, I picked the biggest greens and cooked them for supper.  Yum!  And the best part was that they were "freebies" - volunteers from last year's crop that never did very well - no effort at all on my part.

The stout little Mascotte green beans are blooming.  I am anxious to see them make their crop, which is supposed to occur in the top of the plant, rather than underneath the foliage like ordinary green beans.