The rotten tomato harvest in 2021

This spring after my yearly burst of gardening when I renew of flower pots,  Jan felt inspired and went tomato shopping.  With the memory of the tomato plants in our vacation house last year that furnished us each day some lovely fresh tomatoes, and the fun I had making fresh tomato soup, we were going to give it a try at home.  We figured that our little city garden wall might be a warm enough spot to nurture them.

And so we got pots and plants and fertilizer.  And they grew quickly and moved up and were a wild bush of leaves. But Jan read and started trimming them on a regular basis to move them up. 

And we got flowers and we got plenty of little tomatoes and we looked forward to seeing them turn red in the sun. 

But where was the sun this summer? We had no sun. We got rain instead.  We drowned.  And as of July I started reading everywhere from other Belgian hobby gardeners the lamentations of their lost tomato harvest.   All tomatoes got touched by a fungus (?) disease through the wet weather.  Ours still looked happy and promising at that time with over 40 tomatoes waiting to ripe...

While we already cursed and started to realise that at this summer pace they would ripen at the earliest during our vacation this year,  the first brown leaves appeared in August.  Jan tried to cut them out right away but after a week, it was in the stems too.   We left on vacation realising that we were hit too and that even our caretakers wouldn't profit from the tomatoes in our absence. 

Indeed, we returned to a brown rotten mess in the garden. We've not been able to eat a single one.  How sad.  Also at our havest farm, this year it isn't the drought preventing good harvests...the high humidity is now harming other types of plants and also the tomato harvest (in garden houses so shielded from the rain) is lower too.   

Let's hope for better luck next year again?   We do think we'll try again.  Does anyone know if all earth should be thrown out? Is the disease in the earth too? We assume we'd better not take the risk and renew everything?