Hi, I have some aloe vera and a night blooming cerus that I would like to trade for some of your tomato plants. LMK Thanks, Pat patknln@yahoo.com

Vaughn, Thats a nice tomato variety and 6-7 hours of Carolina sunlight will be plenty. The pine needles really wont be a problem AFTER you have amended the soil as they dont break down enough to be a factor on the PH. Most Carolina soil is naturally acidic so you will always be adding lime or alternatives to raise the PH. I would take advantage of the free NC soil test to see what else you need to do to the soil to amend it. Tomatoes love potassium which most soil is lacking also, the soil test will tell you what to add. If you eat eggs keep the shells all through the winter and put eggshells in the the tomato hole when you go to plant. Yes, the deer will eat the tomatoes so hang a bar of soap in the area to keep them away, yes it does work. Old sneakers work too but I am still wearing mine :) If you are interested in another heirloom the Principe Borghese is an excellent paste tomato that grows well here in NC, produces loads of tomatoes throughout the summer. Let us know how it goes, Termater

Hi Dale!!!! How are you? Long time no see. I hope the business is doing great. I always was a horrible typist, but I did start out as a 'stenographer' at General Dynamics in the earliest 1980s. Even though they hired me for my shorthand (140 words per minute, I'm proud to say), I mostly typed and this was back when we had to type on IBM Selectric typewriters and and then had to learn to type on computers (called word processors at the time) and I hated them. LOL In the mid-1980s we had to start using a brand new (in the business world) process called 'Electronic Mail' on our brand new computerized word processors and I didn't like it either and could not see its' worth, which just goes to show that I am not good at spotting trends! So, I guess I've been typing a long time but never especially liked it...and didn't stay a stenographer long either, promoting out of secretarial work and into first a personnel administrative job and then later an accounting job before I quit my job in the early 1990s to do the whole stay-at-home-mom thing. I then spent the rest of the 1990s and even the earliest 2000s avoiding computers because I had my fill of them at work all those years. After we moved to a fairly remote, rural area ihere in Oklahoma in the late 1990s, I eventually had to learn to like my computer and communicate on it in order to stay in touch with what was going on in the real world. Now, of course, I cannot imagine my life without electronic communication. I do always write long threads, though, and that's just me trying to be thorough and complete and cover all the bases. Hope you're well and looking forward to another great garden year. Dawn

Gravel creates a perched water table. There is a lot of information about it on the soil forum. When water moves through soil it tends to cling a bit to particles right above larger particles, so the soil right above the gravel will be wet. It's better to have the same material all the way through your pot. Your tomatoes still look pretty good. Keeping the watering even is just as important in preventing blossom end rot as calcium. When the soil goes from wet to dry back and forth, the roots don't take up the calcium even if it is there.