Brenda, It takes a complicated set of circumstances to initiate blooming in a tomato plant, but it all relates to how many leaves the plant has, and it isn't exactly the same for every tomato variety. Once a tomato plant has reached that certain number of leaves, auxins develop that trigger the blooming---taking the plant from only vegetative growth to reproductive growth. If the daytime high temperatures and nighttime low temperatures are in the right range when the flowers form, pollination will occur and you'll get fruit. Sometimes the early flowers form too early, in terms of air temperatures, and do not form fruit and fall off the plant. You can remove the early blossoms if you so choose, but I never do. Every flower you remove is a potential fruit. Because the temperatures here often get too hot too early in the year before a lot of fruit can set, I hate to do anything that interferes with fruitset. Usually, the temperatures don't get too hot for tomatoes to set fruit until sometime in mid- to late-June in my part of the state, but last year they got too hot in May. So, if you remove the early blossoms, you're betting that the really hot weather will arrive later rather than sooner. If it were my plant, I'd leave it alone and let it do what comes naturally to it. It is your plant, though, so you should do what feels right to you. Carol gave you a lot of good advice and information specific to Roma so I won't repeat it. I agree with everything she said about it. I've got 80 paste tomato plants in the ground and only three or four of them are Roma. There are a bunch of paste tomato varieties that suit my needs better than it does and that produce later. When Roma sets so much fruit so early in the season (which is typical of it), that's when you tend to see the blossom end rot issues with it because its own vascular system is too immature to function correctly with a heavy load of fruit on a young plant. I consider that to be the main failing of Roma. Mulch will keep the root zone cooler and I'm all in favor of adding more mulch as the soil heats up. However, it won't impact whether or not your tomatoes set fruit. The plants are affected by air temperatures more so than soil temperatures, as long as the soil temperatures are above about 50-55 degrees. (Soil temps lower than that slow down the growth of the plant.) There are many good blackberry varieties. I like Cherokee and Navajo, but you'll be limited to what you find in the stores and I don't know what they have this year because I haven't looked at them. Blackberries produce on old growth, so don't expect much in the way of berries this year. Plants put into the ground this year might give you some berries if they are pretty large and the larger canes are from last year, but basically if you're planting the plants now, your first real harvest will be next year. Gardening in Oklahoma is challenging, but I don't consider it war. You just have to learn to roll with the punches and be flexible and able to change your plans quickly when Mother Nature throws you a curve ball. This year, we got hot early, so I planted early and so far it has paid off. In other years, if you plant earlier than the recommended dates, all you get is frozen plants. You have to take advantage of any little bit of help Mother Nature supplies---because sometimes she is not helpful at all (last year is a pretty good example of that). There are points in time when gardening can be stressful, but if you feel stressed about it all the time, you need to ask yourself what you can do to lessen your stress (and I am not talking about giving up gardening). Remember that plants want to grow. All we have to do is give them what they need--good soil with proper nutrients in it or supplemental feedings if the soil is poor, adequate light, adequate water, the proper temperatures (i.e. don't plant tomatoes in the ground in February or lettuce in May) for their needs, and protection from wildlife, and they will grow and produce just fine. Try not to obsess over the plants too much. Just plant them and let them grow. With people who are newer to gardening, it often is a case of "loving your plants to death" with too much attention, rather than too little. Most plants will do just fine without much attention from us if we just leave them alone and let them do what they do. GarnerGarden, There are lots of people in Georgia who'd be happy to explain to you how challenging it is to grow some things there. I wouldn't exactly consider Georgia an easy place to grow plants in the native soil in full sun. Gardeners there have many challenges just as we do here, and in fact, a lot of the challenges are very similar. From your perspective, it was easy because you were growing in containers that did not receive a lot of direct light. Since you could control the soil quality, the moisture and were not dealing with full sun all day long, of course everything did well. The gardening season here is young and if things are not going well, y'all certainly have time to turns things around. Dawn

I cannot plant a lot of the real cool-season stuff like spinach until fall because we're often still in the 100s here in early September. I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for a normal summer with only normal summer hot temps and with normal rainfall instead of last year's insanely hot and dry weather. It would be nice to be able to keep the garden going all summer long with succession plantings without having to worry about a really sky-high water bill. Usually I go through my seeds about now to make sure that if there is anything I need for fall/winter, I have time to get it. Down here they usually start yanking seed racks out of some stores in June as if the planting season has ended. That drives me crazy! Territorial Seed Company does a better job than most seed companies of providing seeds and plants for fall and winter gardening. They even have a Fall/Winter Garden catalog that you can request at the website. I'll link their website below. They also have fall/winter gardening guides, seed of fall and winter cover crops, etc. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Fall Gardening/Territorial Seed Company

yep that they are, i went out today and cut a number of non producing branches lower on the monsters. I used some garden twine to tie up a number of the others so they would grow up instead of out. They have completely filled and exceeded the capacity of out homemade tomato cages that are 6 foot tall and probable a good 2-1/2' in diameter. The good thing is that all of our friends will have lots of tomatoes to share at home. I have yet to hear anything bad about the Excalibur dehydrators so i am hoping i can get away with a refurbished model holding out long enough for the 10 year warranty period. I don't think i have any recipes for hot sauce, maybe i will Google some tomorrow. Just about everything i make needs to be able to be canned though, we put up a lot of food for the winter months. We cleaned and canned almost 30 quarts of peaches today YUM! I have started to notice the quality of people on this forum. I am still getting used to the format, NAXJA.ORG being one of the only other forums i frequent (for Jeep Cherokees) I got used to the layout and different tracking methods etc. Those two rascals can be a handful, my niece doesn't tire nearly as quickly as my nephew, Tyler will see a bug or a cat and go haywire. But my niece Lexi likes to help out when she can as long as its not longer than an hour or so, and small relegated tasks seem to be a lot more productive than the kind of work i was doing when i was little haha.But I agree, I hope they will have their own gardens some day, I sure am enjoying my parents' garden and i don't know what i will do when i get my degree and enter the workforce and have to find a place of my own! I have also been exploring the forums a but asking questions about making stained glass and transplanting trees like the black walnut and catalpa trees that grow wild around here. There are also some blackjack oak a few miles from me but I have to get a new radiator for my jeep first, i don't plan on bringing saplings back with me on my bike. Although I am a "fire-belly" I also have a huge passion for berries nuts and indigenous flora. So i have been trying to get my dad to let me relocate some sand plums, pecan trees and a couple other misc things i found interesting on hikes to his yard, but he doesn't share my enthusiasm it seems anyway, I'm off to bed, and up in the morning to deal with those pesky Japanese beetles on my grapes and peach trees. -Trent

Sharonie, WOW really not a big deal if you know it is not going to be stable. Putting bucket upside down and refilling each tube around it does the trick. I put tomato cages into mine as I start with open ¨teepee¨ to begin with. It works for me. Some people do bamboo ¨teepee¨ which works as well. Then you can do closed easier. I might do bamboo next year as I am hoping to start April 20 instead of my usual April 26. I love using them. For the bed with peppers and eggplants I will be using floating row covers next year. Getting soil prewarmed with el cheapo landscape fabric is a must for me. I like el cheapo from dollar store since I only need it for about a month. Also it is imperative for me to use cold treatment for seeds as well as choose varieties that set fruit in cold weather well to get my earliest fruits. If I have more WOW I would put more plants in it. Overall I achieve not only earlier ripe tomatoes, but plants with WOW have longer flowering season, produce more and even now have more greenies on it in the end of the season than ones that were planted in regular for me time. Currently I have 32 WOW and am planning to get few more next year. Takes me few hours to set them up but then I have done it for several years now. Description of cold treatment by Ami, he is one knowledgeable gardener. Ever wondered how commercial seedling providers get these beautiful, stalky, plants with thick stems to market? It's called the cold treatment and has been going on at commercial greenhouses for over 30 years. Here's how they do it. This was taken out of the book "Greenhouse Tomatoes, Lettuce & Cucumbers" by S.H. Wittwer & S. Honma where they recommend 'Cold Treatment' for hardening off tomato seedlings. The cold treatment should be started just as the first true leaves emerge, whether the seedlings are still in seed rows or pricked-off. Air and soil temperatures should be lowered to 52 to 56 deg F for ten days to three weeks. A ten to twelve day cold treatment is adequate during periods of good sunlight. Three weeks are usually necessary in the fall and early winter when most of the days are cloudy and plant growth is slow. The amount of cold during the ten-day to three week period is more important than the time of day in which it is given. Cold exposure during either the day or night, or both, is effective. Night temperatures of 52 to 56 deg F are recommended when the days are sunny and partly cloudy. Following the cold treatment, night temperatures should be raised to 58 to 62 deg F. Cool daytime temperatures (60 to 62 deg F) should be maintained in cloudy dull weather. On bright sunny or partly cloudy days, temperatures of 65 to 75 deg F accompanied by good ventilation are suggested. Tomato plants properly exposed to a cold treatment develop large cotyledons and thick stems, with fewer leaves formed before the first flower cluster, up to double the number of flowers in the first, and often the second clusters, and higher early and total yields. Basically this cold treatment is used to give healthier, more stalky seedlings that will give increased yields and earlier harvests. In regards to light intensity and duration they had this to say. The tomato is a facultative short day plant which flowers and fruits earliest if the day is not extended beyond 12 hours by artificial light. Young tomato plants do not need the light intensities of full sunlight. Where there is no overlapping of leaves, light saturation is reached at intensities from 2000 to 3000 foot candles, or about one-fifth to one-third the intensity of direct sunlight at high noon. If artificial lights are used, an intensity of at least 500 foot candles should be provided at the leaf surface. Tests with fluorescent fixtures reveal that Wide Spectrum Gro Lux is slightly superior to cool white. Hope this helps. Ami