Hi - go ahead and take of bottom tomato leaves if you want - that will never be a problem. Has nothing to do with whether the plant is producing fruit or not. I yank leaves every day. If I don't like the looks of a leaf or it's yellow or droopy I break it off. On the snap peas, well, they are starting to go down which is what they do in the heat. Mine are gone already and I am re-planting them for the Fall by the end of this month. What you are seeing is the beginning of the end.

i live in SF city and this is the perfect time for my pea pods i can actually grow pea pods most of the year except in aug, sept and oct. nov and dec not enough sun, i don't think its too late my 6 plants are eight inches tall and in the ground starting to crawl up the supports, they were started from seeds last month, i have three plants just starting to flower and those were started in feb but slow until the last couple of weeks they just took off. i plant seeds every year and i save seeds , let some pods mature on the vine for next years crop . my lacinato kale is only 4 inches tall , but my collards , i've started havesting leaves every other week as we get more. not too for peas

Thank you Tom, for responding! I'll skip the beans then and just go with the sugar snaps. Your bean pods look gorgeous, almost too pretty to eat ;) I ordered sugar snaps, sugar lace II and super sugar snaps from park seed as I couldn't find them locally at the big box stores and had a 10 dollar gift certificate, also got some Swiss chard, bright lights and a packet of Hestia beans and some chocolate cherry seeds, I did grow the cheery tomatoes last year and fell in love with them. This year I'm growing 10 plants of all different kinds, I don't care if I have big yields or not, just playing while I'm learning and I get to try different varieties to keep growing again if I like something a lot. I do grow micro salad greens and love them. I've learned to stagger them by 1 or 2 week intervals to always have enough every day. For spring I am clearing a 25 by 16 area that gets full sun and hope to grow tomatoes, snaps, beans and a few other things. My tomatoes I've learned to grow in containers only but hope the peas and beans and other veggies can go in the ground. I should be ready to turn in compost, potting soil from repotted plants in that area, cover with black plastic until I'm ready to actually plant. Nice weather for 6 months to do a lot!

"I have a line of Sugar Magnolia that gives quite a few hyper-tendril plants. I would breed away from this trait, it has too many negatives for overall production." Glad to hear someone has tried that variant before I did. What were the negatives? Low yield per plant is not necessarily a negative, nor is the hypertendril trait, if the plants are short enough to plant without support. As long as you don't mind bending over to harvest, that is. I grow "Sugar Lace", which is also hypertendril. The plants are short & support each other, which makes them suitable for wide rows. It is the only PVP vegetable that I grow, which given how I feel about patenting food plants, shows how much I enjoy the pod quality. I've ruled out trying the parsley trait, I already grow one of Alan's parsley leaf shelling peas, (also purple, perhaps from the same breeding program) and it is "not ready for prime time", so to speak. The plants tend to topple in a strong wind or when loaded with pods, leading to too much pod damage. Still trying to select it for something useful, but since I only grow it every other year or so, progress is slow. All else being equal, though, I prefer pole varieties of almost anything where I have that choice. It makes harvest easier, and keeps the pods further out of reach from bugs & rodents. The downside of that is having to set up & tear down trellises, and having to spend time training reluctant climbers.