My figs did weird things - some branches died back to the ground while one or two only died back to around 4 feet. Some have only now started sprouting leaves while other (branches) have good sized fruit. Black Mission completely died back except for one small branch. Kadota completely died back but is sprouting at soil level. Celeste only lost the tips of its longest branches, it has leafed out and has fruit on most branches. Texas Everbearing lost most of its branches but has sprouted from the base and every other bush has at least one branch that survived and has fruit.

My Brunnera is not completely up as large as it should be but it's blooming already. Tonight, though, we are to go down to 26. My plant is next to the house, in a protected area so it should be all right. We did cover the Maiden's Blush lilac that is already starting to bloom. I hope it will make it without cold damage. Linda

You may be overfeeding nitrogen, but it is hard to say without knowing how fertile your soil was before you added the amendments. I really go easy on the nitrogen with tomatoes in order to avoid the 'all leaf, no fruit' syndrome. If anything, I might even underfeed them nitrogen. When growing them in the ground, I add Espoma Tomato Tone at planting time, and then topdress every three weeks when I remember to do so. Well, I planted in early April and have topdressed only once, so I guess I am behind on doing that. I avoid pure blood meal because it gives the plants more nitrogen than they need in my well-amended (with homemade compost) clay. I do sometimes add blood meal to containers, but that's completely different because the roots are a captive audience in containers and nutrients leach out with the heavy watering required to keep tomatoes happy in containers in our climate. None of the varieties you planted are especially late to set fruit, so the 4 larger fruited ones (Cherokee Purple, Carbon, Eva Purple Ball and Sioux) all should be flowering and setting fruit at about the same time, all other things being equal. Your plants have been in the ground only about six weeks and that's not a terribly long period of time. At this point, they should be gaining height at the rate of about an inch a day and should be forming flowers. If they are growing but not regularly forming flowers, I wouldn't feed them anything else. You need for them to flower well and set fruit in June before the temperatures get too hot. A dozen or so flowers per plant isn't bad for plants that went into the ground in mid-April. Tomato plants generally will not produce more fruit than they can support, so you wouldn't expect to have 30 or 40 flowers on plants 2 to 3 feet tall. I don't really think you have anything to worry about. They sound like they are on-track for your part of the state. I've grown all the varieties you're growing and they grow fine for me. I usually plant Indian Stripe nowaday instead of Cherokee Purple (they are very similar) because it gives me higher yields and earlier yields. And, look, I didn't say a word about how many tomatoes I may or may not be harvesting. Dawn

I am in Boston, they produce no flowers for pollination to become an issue at all. Might be a sun issue? That was kind of my guess as well, they are in an area with some sun but not massive amounts of sun as there are some trees around. Anyway, they are gone, took four hours of work, I was sad to see them go but once I saw how much effort it took to remove them I could see how invasive they had become, I guess just was not gonna work for me, I think I gave it the royal try for about 8 years! thanks everyone for their help