Hi "Love to grow flowers"- Our Karyn has given us the best advice again. It sounds like your brug might have died back. If you look closely, sometimes you can distinguish between the dead tissue and the living. I've noticed that the dead tissue looks like it's peeling, grey & shriveled,or a hard, dried up brown stick. It seems to die from the top down to where the living tissue is. Just my experience anyway. If your roots remain alive, and you increase it's warmth & sunlight, you'll be surprised how your plant will start sending up shoots & leaves. Best wishes to you, and welcome! kasha77

I wasn't planning on forcing dormancy as I don't have a place that I could actually do that. With regards to putting it outside I could do that but am a little worried that with it's current growth it is really susceptible to wind damage. If possible I'd like to keep it indoors. I have been rotating it's position as it grows to try and get it to grow a little more fully (which may be part of the reason it's so topsy turvy) and if this is a fine approach I'll continue to do so. The plant does have one may 'Y' of growth and several branches from each split so far. It has actually been Y'd for almost 2 years and still no hints of blooms. Keep the input coming :) Regards, Joe

John, I had a pretty good year here. French Canadian is on her third flush with another to come if the temps hold. I think it is just that way some years, I had one like that a couple of years ago with no rhyme or reason. I figure they should be allowed the odd 'off' one. :) I say this for any and all zones.... improve your soil and plant them directly into the ground so you do not have to fertilize or water so much. A good root system will give you a good plant and good flowers. I fertilized mine for only the second( and last) time this year the last week in August. That is really my only 2 'secrets'.

I like larger tomatoes within a particular variety (i.e. I prefer to have 5 large black krim to 8 smaller black krim). As long as the fruits are not catfaced/from ultra annoying fused blossoms, I find that larger fruits (as long as they come pretty early in the season, before the evenings get too cool) taste just as good as smaller ones. I like them large because I like to peel them before putting them in salads (easier to peel fewer large ones than more small ones), and because I like to have large slabs/slices for presentation, so smaller pieces are not falling out of my sandwich, etc. If I found that the quality was poorer for the larger ones, I would just put up with the pain in the butt involved with peeling etc. and just take the smaller ones. I also find that I usually have more production than I can eat, so if I had a plant with 30 pounds of small ones or the same plant with 25 pounds of larger (and of course fewer) tomatoes, I would sacrifice the pounds to get the larger ones that I want. I am not talking about growing monster tomatoes, just tomatoes that are closer to the high end of what is normal for a variety. So, with this goal in mind, what I have gleaned from the many messy convoluted subjective discussions on pruning is that: 1. Having more stems will not decrease fruit size, in that the fruit on stem #2 is largely if not exclusively fed by the leaves on stem #2 (vs. the leaves on other stems), and in terms of whatever it takes from the root system, there is not a significant draw by stem #2 from the nutrients that would otherwise go to feed stem #1. So more stems = more fruit of a normal size. 2. Within any particular stem, and on any particular fruiting branch, more fruits on 1 branch MAY mean that each fruit may be smaller, and it MAY be possible to increase the size of each fruit on that stem/branch by reducing the number of tomatoes on that stem/branch. MAY is emphasized because I don't think I have ever seen this emphatically stated, but rather it has been suggested as a possibility/probability. So, I have allowed my plants to become multi-stemmed monsters, and after an explosion of flowers followed by favourable weather many plants are covered with tomatoes (some beefteak varieties have more than 40 toms between the size of a grape and the size of a golf ball). I have my fruit, and in order to have the fruit get the the size I prefer, I MAY cull some of the fruit. I also expect that I will begin to remove the growing tips of suckers that start growing now, particulary at the top of the plant, because some have so many stems now that they will produce more than I can handle/more than I will be able to easily stake between now and the end of the growing season up here. I will missouri prune any suckers that I decide to remove, with the hopes that this will result in the stem acting like a branch to feed the plant (though as with many other aspects of tomato growing I do not recall seeing anything besides subjective commentary to lead me to belive that this would happen).