It would be safe to use sliced ones but I fear you wouldn't care for the texture as much. Sliced quite thickly they may hold their shape and some crispness but in general sliced will be more mushy than chunked ones - no skin to keep the innards contained. ;) If you are using strickly cherry varieties then you won't be able to core them anyway so I'd suggest just cutting them in half rather than slicing. Dave

Ilene, TOMATOES: If I lived in your part of the state, I believe I would spray the plants with Daconil. I like to do things the organic way, but there is no good organic solution to EB. Sometimes you have to choose to use a chemical or there is little to no harvest at all. Heck, some years I wish I had started Daconil at transplant time. By the time you see EB, by the way, it is too late to start Daconil and expect good results. Daconil is most effective at keeping EB away, but once EB arrives, Daconil does not "kill" it although it might slow its spread. My choice not to use Daconil explains why I replant for fall tomatoes--because the EB damages the spring-planted ones so severely in late June through late July that it is easier to start over with fresh plants for a fall harvest. Usually, but not always, my cherry tomato plants and a few others outgrow the EB, but a lot of the others do not. CABBAGE: Well, my personal solution would be that you convince your spouse you need a tornado shelter. (Then (hee hee) you could use it as a root cellar. However, if that is not practical, here's a few other suggestions. 1. For best keeping, plant a cabbage that is a long keeper. Harvest while slightly undersized (slightly larger than a softball). For spring-planted cabbage, cut off the head off the stump of the plant with a sharp knife and leave the roots/stump in the ground. You ought to get a new, small head on the stump, or with some cabbages, you get multiple sprouts that look like brussels sprouts. You can harvest and eat them like brussels sprouts. 2. For fall-planted cabbage, you can leave it in the garden bed all fall and most of winter if you heavily mulch it....and if mice, voles, rats and squirrels don't find it and eat it. You can build an above ground "storage pit" using 6 or 8 bales of hay placed around a row of several cabbages, and the put a piece of plywood over the tops of the bales and then lay a couple of bags of leaves on top of the plywood as insulation. You also can store cabbage heads for 3-6 months in a fridge. Sometimes you can store cabbage in an unheated garage or shed or an unheated screened-in porch or breezeway. The results are variable, though, and this works best if you have pretty good humidity and a stable, cold winter.....not one like this year with multiple days where the temps have gone pretty high. Sometimes you can store cabbage in an unheated attic or crawl space under a house. This works best if you can hang the cabbage (maybe using cheesecloth or something similar) so it has air all around it. Success will vary, and mice or other rodents might get to it. In the absence of a cellar, basement, root cellar or tornado shelter, you can store in a pit. See the linked publication for a good description of how to build one. You can even store in a trench dug in your garden. I think that is described in the linked publication too. You can make sauerkraut. You can slice it, blanch it, and freeze it. Of course, after that, it is only good for cooking. You can preserve cabbage by canning it in chow chow relish, traditional corn relish, Dixie relish, Piccallili relish, Red Root Relish (if it is red cabbage),Sweet and Sour Pepper Relish or Spiced Red Cabbage. I am sure there are many other ways to can it as well. Finally, if you have a dehydrator you can dry it and use it in cooking. To dry it, split the cabbage and cut out the bitter core. Slice up the rest and spread it on drying trays. Dry it at a fairly low temperature--about 120 or so--because higher temps will burn it up. Dry it until the pieces feel brittle. Then, store it in dried shreds or grind it up into a powder and add it to soups, stews or salads. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Long-Term Home Garden Vegetable Storage

Hi Sheepie! Lots of rain has been falling north and northwest of us--has it been raining at your place the last couple of days? Hank, I've never used dental floss, but then I cage my tomatoes and don't generally have to tie anything. I just poke the ends of the branches back inside the cages when they try to "escape". I use various types of material in the garden to tie plants to fences, stakes or other supports, including jute twine, cotton twine, green velcro ties bought in a roll at the garden center, and old panty hose. I am a little concerned that something as thin as dental floss might cut little grooves into tender green plant tissue, though. Sheri, I think I will do another post on bugs in the garden in general, but let me say a couple of things quickly here. 1) Spiders are the absolute best thing to have in the garden because they are there for one reason and one reason alone and that is to eat insects. The spiders are your friend! Well, one year I had black widows in the garden, and I had to get rid of them, but other harmless spiders took their place and that was fine. 2) If you have a lot of pest bugs in the garden, you need more bugs and not less. Are you seeing any lady bugs or green lacewings? If so, that is great. Like spiders, the lady bugs and green lacewings are there to eat pest bugs. I bought those little bags or cartons of lady bugs at nurseries several years in a row and released them into my garden. I now have a healthy population of ladybugs and no longer have to buy any. The ladybugs and the green lacewings (I only had to release them one year to build a good population) leep most pests under control. 3) Most ants in general are good for the garden. They scavenge and remove dead bugs, bug eggs, etc. Some of our tiny native ants prey upon imported fire ants. I have two harvester ant beds right outside my garden and they are a huge help to me. I do treat with Safer organic fire ant bait for fire ants in the garden. Try to think of ants as an important part of the natural pest control system. 4) If your tomatoes have obvious insect bites on them, I would look for green tomato hornworms (I have had one monster-sized one strip an entire plant bare this week, including eating most of 4 tomatoes that were the size of tennis balls) or for stinkbugs. It is just about stinkbug time here. 5) Crickets and grasshoppers are a very complicated problem. I'll go into them on a separate post specifically about them, so it will be easy for someone to find later on if they are doing a 'search' of this forum. 6) Flies are a nuisance. I have never worried about them or tried to get rid of them, but then I am in horse and cattle ranch country where the flies outnumber the humans about a billion to one. 7) Caterpillars are complicated. The easy way to deal with them organically is to use Bt, a bacteria that kills any caterpillar, moth or butterfly that comes into contact with it. Bt is an organic product and is often found in products labeled 'Caterpillar Killer'. Because I love the butterflies and moths, I quit using Bt several years ago. Whether to use BT or not is an individual choice and I respect anyone's right to use it to rid their landscape of caterpillars. I prefer to not use it on our property, though, and just handpick caterpillars that have become a problem. It is easy to see bugs in the garden and get panicky and want to get rid of them all. I understand that. I have been there myself. When I was a young child, my dad sprayed DDT and other poisons to rid his garden of bugs. When I was a teenager, my dad sprayed religiously with Kelthane to get rid of the spider mites on his tomatoes. When I was a young woman in my 20s, with a family, home and garden of my own, my dad used Sevin dust as a multi-purpose bug killer. I tried his methods when I was in my mid- to late-20s and found they really didn't work. I started looking for a better way. It took me a few years, but I finally got it right. I'll describe it in the post I write in a few minutes about bugs. I'm not saying my way is the best way, but it is the best way for me and for all the critters who share this piece of land my family calls home. Dawn

Spider mites can't cause holes in the leaves, though they can cause discoloration and stunting... I'm guessing they aren't that severe yet, though. I'd love to have a better picture, if you can manage it, as I can't see what effect there is on the leaves. I will tell you that 1) nothing you did mulchwise or with the soil sounds bad, and 2) I don't know of anything soilborne that would cause quite this sort of effect. The sole exception is if some of that brush you burned was walnut trees... but even then, I'd expect wilting rather than streaking and stunting. Just based on the one picture, I'm leaning toward a virus (probably Potato virus Y or Tobacco etch potyvirus); the stunting alone screams either nutrient problems or virus, and I rarely see bad stunting from nutrient problems outside of hydroponic setups. Better pictures would help a lot in confirming or rejecting that theory, however. (dyannel or allisoncollins, feel free to contribute pictures too, if you have them.) --Alison