You're right that surviving on a homestead sounds very... unromantic to me. I planted a bunch of apple trees, berry bushes..etc, over a year ago. I fertilize and water, but somehow blight took it all. It seems like nature is constantly trying to fight you on everything.
It seems like it's you fighting, but that's only from your relative perspective, it is a windmill you are fighting, like Don Quixote. In terms of the grand scale, ecology exists on an equilibrium. When you shift that equilibrium and create an abundance of resources that weren't there before, the system will respond and attempt to consume that newfound abundance. Pests will consume available food and pathogens will spread to available hosts, if these things are allowed to happen.
This has happened to me in my garden just this season with looper caterpillars, grasshoppers, aphids, spider mites, and rats. I've practically opened a grocery store for them so I can't blame them, but in knowing that my directed change of the local ecology leads to this localized response of more aphids or whatever, I am able to take preventative measures to make my crop less attractive to interlopers (neem oil and bt in my case), and combat the response that happens from me shifting the ecological equilibrium by growing all these tasty plants from all over the world in my garden in an area where they wouldn't normally be found naturally. Maybe in your case combating your blight pathogen in the future means work making sure the soil is free of spores, planting practices that might avoid blight to a degree, or selecting hardier varieties that are better suited to your local conditions or resistant to blight if such cultivars are available. The battle becomes less like a fruitless effort (pardon the pun) and more like a game of chess when you start studying this stuff a little bit.
Thanks for the tips. I kinda just figured it would be easy lol. It certainly isn't. I've tried some Neem oil and fungicides that have helped, but it's a full time job.
