Joellen,

Your results are fairly typical for this area. Brandywine is always slow to set fruit here and it doesn't usually set many. It is a late-season tomato and it doesn't like our heat/humidity.

Royal Hillbilly is one of my favorites, but its performance is highly variable. It does always set fruit and most years it sets fruit reasonably early, shuts down a little bit in extreme heat, and sets fruit again during cool spells if they occur in the summer, or in the fall if the summer is steadfastly hot/humid.

Rutgers is a late mid-season and it is further complicated by whether you have the original Rutgers released in the 1920s, which is an indeterminate and it often is sold nowadays as Rutgers Select. It sets fairly early for me. I have it in the garden this year and it does have good fruitset. If you have the later Rutgers Improved that was released around 1934 and which has VFA resistance, it is a determinate and will give you a heavy fruitset all at once. It is usually a few days later to set fruit than Rutgers Select. It became more popular for a time than the original Ruters, so they began selling it as Rutgers and pretty much dropped the original one before bringing it back for folks who like indeterminates. These days if you buy a plant labeled "Rutgers VFA" or "Rutgers Improved", it tends to be the determinate one. Isn't this confusing?

I don't know what your heat and humidity have been like the last couple of weeks, but at my house they've been high enough to impede fruitset. Cooler weather arrives for a few days, generally beginning tomorrow. Watch your plants and see if they form any fruit during the cooler spell. There's a couple of ways you can help them along.

Higher heat tends to make pollen 'sticky' so it doesn't move around inside the flower. You can thump individual flowers with your fingers a couple of times to help shake loose the pollen, or you can gently shake each plant (this is easier if they're caged or well-staked) to shake up the pollen. When I lived in Texas, gardening guru Neil Sperry always recommended walking down the row of caged tomato plants with a tennis racket in your hand and giving each cage a couple of good hard whacks to shake up the pollen. Some people on the Tomato Forum carry a rechargeable electric toothbrush to the garden and 'vibrate' each flower with it which is similar to the shaking blossoms receive from honey bees and other pollinators. The tomato flowers are perfect and don't "need" pollinators, but visits from pollinators do help them by shaking up sticky pollen.

I suspect your problems are more weather-related than not, and a cool spell and a bit of time will give you fruitset.

Dawn

Joellen,
I agree with what Dawn said. Brandywine in this area for myself and most growers I talk too a poor producer. Many grow it for great flavor. I have never experienced that great of flavor myself. Lucky Cross is also a poor producer but is the best tasting tomato I've ever grown.

Rutgers the year I grew it was an average producer. This if my first year for Royal Hillbilly. It is blooming now. If the heat gives it a chance I'll be able to give a better opinion later. Jay

Jay, I thought you were in Colorado. I saw the story on the gasline explosion in the TX panhandle yesterday and wondered if your company went down that far. That's two in two days in Texas, isn't it? Scary!!

I have Brandywine seed but I didn't even plant any this year. I had lots of new ones to try and really didn't want to waste time on one that wasn't productive. I grew it one year here and I think I got about 6 tomatoes the whole year.

I have brandywine black and it is producing good for me. I did plant it in my most shady spot of my garden, but it is only shaded in the morning til noon.

Some say spray with a compost tea to get better fruit set. Never tried it myself.

Carol,

As far as I know, Jay is away at class for a couple of days, but he presumably has internet access there since he posted this morning.

Jay,

Lucky Cross is almost as good as Brandywine Sudduth's and produces about the same for me, so I gave up growing it after a few years. Earl's Faux is another in that category. Based on their flavor and low productivity, I think it likely Earl's Faux and Lucky Cross have a lot of Brandywine genes.

Boomer,

It's time to begin your Brandywine education, and I'm going to open a can of worms because some people accept that all tomatoes with Brandywine in their name are 'real' Brandywines and some don't. Black Brandywine may or may not be from the line of Brandywine genetics, but it is not the one we're talking about when we use the name Brandywine.

When we use only the word Brandywine, we are referring to the one and only Brandywine, aka Brandywine Sudduth's, and it is a potato-leaved plant that produces large pink beefsteak tomatoes with simply amazing and unique flavor. Because Brandywine is widely known/accepted as the absolute best tomato ever, there are many 'pretenders to the throne' that either have Brandywine in their name or about which it is claimed that they have Brandywine in their parentage. I have tried some of these Brandywines and find little resemblance between them and Brandywine Sudduth's, although some of them are fine tomatoes on their own merits and don't have to try to ride Brandywine Sudduth's coattails. There are also some other tomato varieties about whom the claim is made that they "beat Brandywine in a taste test"....well, I don't know which Brandywine they supposedly beat, but none of them has been nearly as good as Brandywine Sudduth's as grown in my garden, so I take all those claims with a grain of salt.

Among the 'other' Brandywines that may or may not have any true and legitimate DNA connection to the original Brandywine/Brandywine Sudduth's are these: Glick's Brandywine, Red Brandywine, Brandywine OTV, Brandywine Quisenberry (may be the same as Sudduth's), Earl's Faux, Brandywine Cowlick, Yellow Brandywine, Yellow Platfoot Brandywine, Black Brandywine, Purple Brandywine, Plum Brandywine, Babywine and True Black Brandywine. (There are one or two or three dozen others.)

Then, on top of all that there are some recently introduced hybrid tomatoes said to have Brandywine in their parentage, although we have to take the seed company's description of any of them with a grain of salt because they do not release actual parentage of any tomato nowadays, nor are they required to---it is considered proprietary information. Of these, Burpee's Brandy Boy is by far the best of the ones I've tried. This year I'm growing three new ones whose name suggest they have Brandywine in their parentage: Pink Brandymaster, Brandymaster Red and Brandymaster Yellow. Of course, with the word 'master' in their name, you might wonder if they have Beefmaster in their heritage too...who knows?

Regarding Black Brandywine and True Black Brandywine, I have grown both but not together in the same year. For me, based on their performance in my garden, True Black Brandywine produced very early and very heavy yields and I was very pleased with it as it had very good flavor. Black Brandywine has not been as impressive. Some tomato afficianados do not like William Woys Weaver's history/description of True Black Brandywine, but he is a credible food historian and author and an expert on heirloom vegetables and I see no reason to take issue with his description of True Black Brandywine's history, which is linked with his family history. The flavor of True Black Brandywine is fine indeed, but it is not (sadly) quite as good as that of Brandywine Sudduth's. Still, it is a fine, fine tomato. I grew it in a row of other black tomatoes a few years ago...I think it was in a row along with Black Krim, Indian Stripe, Cherokee Purple and Black Cherry, and only Black Cherry set fruit earlier than it did, which would be expected according to their general published DTMs.

I am trying some of Keith's Brandywine crosses this year, courtesy of seeds sent to me by The Tomato King (that's Jay to those of you who are fairly new here) and can't wait to try them, along with a couple of others like Dana's Dusky Rose (one will be ripe any day now) and JD's Special C-Tex. Many people who've grown Keith's Brandywine crosses have raved about their flavor and productivity, so maybe in my case, I'll finally have found a variety that tastes reallly close to the flavor of the Brandywine and that produces well too. If that's true, I'll stop messing with the others and just grow Keith's crosses.

One of the people (perhaps 'the' one) in this country who best knows and understands the history of the Brandywine and who has the credentials to write about it with authority is Craig LeHoullier. I've linked his Brandywine history/description from the Victory Seed catalog.

If you haven't tried Brandywine Sudduth, I'd suggest it would be worth growing sometime just to see what you think about the flavor. I've eaten a lot of wonderful tomatoes in my lifetime, but none of them is as good as Brandywine and every single person to whom I've given a Brandywine tomato has said to me "That's the best tomato I've ever tasted". It is too bad every tomato cannot taste like the true Brandywine.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Brandywine's History

Well, thats the name the plant had on it when I bought it at sunrise acres. Don't know which one it is.

Which one does joellen have?

Boomer, If Robert Stelle had 'Black Brandywine' on it, I assume it is not 'True Black Brandywine' because his labeling is usually right on.

Joellen didn't mention which Brandywine she is growing, but most of them don't like our heat.

I forgot to mention that another issue is that some commercial seed sellers have sold seed that is RL when it should be PL or vice versa. It drives true tomato purists nuts when that happens, but truthfully, if the tomatoes grow well and taste great, who cares if the plant has the 'wrong' kind of leaves.

Brandywine is unique in that its history is so convoluted and there are so many 'wannabes' masquerading as a Brandywine 'child' or 'strain' or whatever. There are not many other tomato varieties with such a messed-up history, although some would say that there's a similar though smaller issue with Mortgage Lifter....i.e. Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter, Estler's Mortgage Lifter, and the various strains or derivatives thereof.

I don't like to get all picky about tomato history, except when it comes to Brandywine it is important for everyone to know which is the 'real' one so they can grow the best-tasting tomato in the world and not one of the other B'wines. If you have a question about one of the specific B'wines, ask away because between us, I know that Jay and I, among others, have tried quite a few of them in an effort to find one that does well here.

Dawn

I have no idea what my Brandywine is! I didn't even know there were different types. Mine does have the potato leaves.

PS: I have been giving a the flowers a good thumb flick! Will let you know the results. With the small # of plants I am growing, I don't want to waste space on non-producers. I just ate my first (TWO) ripe cherry toms today, and my mouth is watering for some new treats.

joellenh, are your tomatoes getting enough sunshine?

Larry

I had the darndest time getting fruit to set when the temps started getting hot, especially on the Cherokee Purple and Dr Wyche Yellow Both of which I expected to set well in the heat)
Suddenly, when I gave a rest between checking plants for a good 36 hours, I found tons of fruit set. Just proof that a "watched pot never boils"
I have now close to 30 on the 4 Crimson Cushion and 7 on the 5 Cherokee Purple plants. Still ZERO on Dr Wyche's Yellow. I had 3 plants total on the DWY, but I pulled up two to make room for more bush beans.
You think I should keep my last DWY around to see if it fruits?

For fall I have started as outdoor seedlings Green Grape, Aconcagua sweet peppers, eggplant and yellow habanero and intend to take some fall cuttings of Crimson Cushion and Cherokee Purple. I was really discouraged a couple of weeks ago when the temps went way up because last year that's when the Cherokee Purple stopped producing. My Blacktail Mountain is taking off well, as is the Yellow Sugar Lump Watermelons. In giant cages) My 3-year old son is excited about watermelons, and the Black Swallowtail caterpillars on the dill.

Anyway, to stay on topic I've noticed Crimson Cushion likes to set in the heat, which I didn't expect of a "big" tomato.

I'll have seeds to trade in the fall, as I understand CC is an OP variety.

cursing my worthless river-bottom sand,
Dale OKC, near Lake Overholser

Dale,

Dr. Wyche's Yellow tends to be kind of late for me, so don't give up on it. Compared to most other yellow types I've grown, it produces pretty heavily once it starts.

Crimson Cushion/Ponderosa always has produced well for me very late in the season, as have all the very old Livingston varieties (Magnus, Ideal, Favorite, Main Crop Pink, Perfection, Gold Ball, Golden Queen, etc.) which date back as far as the late 1800s and early 1900s. It makes me wonder if varieties bred back then were better at setting in heat.

I'd trade you some Red River red clay for some river bottom sand.

The early arrival of the heat in May is just killing me. This is the hottest early June weather I can remember and I have not liked it one little bit. We've been as hot as 97 here and our heat index has been as high as 105. That kind of heat makes the tomatoes (and me too) cranky.

Dawn

I'm having the same issue. My tomatoes aren't setting fruit either. They are also tiny compared to everyone's that I've seen. I plan to go "shake" the plants tonight!

Being a newbie I planted Heriloom Burbank tomatoes from seed. I had 20+ plants and about 90% of them got chomped to the ground as seedlings by a mysterious pest (maybe a squirrel?). I then put cat hair (gross!) and cayenne pepper around the survivors. No more chomped plants after that!

The 10% that survived are only about 3' tall and have just started flowering. Next year, I'll start with plants from the nursery. :) Live and learn I guess.

I have no idea what my problem this year is but I'm definitely having one. None of my tomatoes are doing well at all - one is near death and is getting ready to be pulled. We had HUGE amounts of rain shortly after I planted them, and then they all experienced leaf curl. I read about it on here and elsewhere and it seemed that this might be a normal problem that would eventually resolve after huge amounts of rain - however they never recovered. They are still growing, with very distorted leaves, still blooming, but not setting fruit. I have checked for all the signs of various virus or bacterial causes to no avail. I imagine I'll be making a trip to the county extension office to get another opinion because obviously if it's bacterial or viral in nature, I will need to have a new plan for my tomatoes next year. (My husband insists he did NOT spray my beds for weeds before I planted but I'm beginning to wonder as it does seem consistent with some type of herbicidal damage.)

On a side note - the war against the SVB moth is a daily battle. Some days i win the battle, some days I feel like I'm losing, but I definitely am having more progress than I did last year. I am picking the eggs off as I find them - I've recruited my husband and college-aged daughter to help as well and between the three of us the plants are still thriving but we have lost a few leaves (I pull them off at the very first sign of a problem - and almost all the time find a teeny tiny grub inside the stem.) I have harvested some squash - have a few more that will be ready in a couple of days, so in a way that feels like triumph since I haven't been able to harvest squash in a couple of years.

Now if I can find a way to still enjoy the bunnies in the yard without them destroying my coneflowers....

~Laura

Joellen, At least yours is PL, so if you get pink fruit, it likely is Brandywine Sudduth's, or what most people think of as the original and best Brandywine.

Larry, From photos Joellen has shown in the past, I believe she has lots of sunshine. The temperatures got too hot too fast...lows over about 72 degrees and highs over about 90 degress (85 degrees with some varieties and 92 with others) cause pollination to be impaired. All Joellen needs is some cooler weather...and we're having that at hour house today, so maybe she is too.

Hannah9, Please don't let chomped plants discourage you. If your garden is not fenced, eventually (sometimes the first year, sometimes not for several years) something will find the garden and eat plants. My garden has been 'assaulted' by all the usual suspects over the years....deer, rabbits, armadilloes, skunks, raccoons, possums, turtles, squirrels, some birds, voles, gophers...you name it, if you're planting plants, they'll come and eat them. I have a really good fence now and very little chomping goes on...except for me eating fresh tomatoes while working in the garden.

Time your seed starting next year so your plants are 6-8 weeks old about the time of your average last freeze date, and you'll have large, blooming plants setting fruit earlier in the season. I start my seeds around Feb. 8-10 for an average last freeze date of March 27th. Precise timing is everything, and it helps to plant more than one variety because some years some varieties just don't do well and then the next year they might do just fine. Thus, planting multiple varieties gives you a better chance of success.

Laura,

I have been very concerned about what all that rain would do to you gardening folks in your part of the state, even as I sit here and wring my hands because no rain has fallen in three weeks here. (Why is rainfall always too much or too little?)

Normally, when you see curled, distorted foliage during or immediately after heavy rainfall, it will resolve itself. However, it can take as long as 6-8 weeks for the plants to begin to recover. Last year, we had 12.89" of rain in one day in late April, and my tomato plants stalled simply forever. The whole situation was worsened because another 6-8" of rain fell in the next few weeks after than one-day record-setting rainfall. I thought my plants would die, but they recovered and I had a great year when all was said and done....I've never put up so many canned, frozen and dehydrated tomatoes as I did last year. So, if it is ONLY rainfall, recovery still could happen.

However, if you're seeing herbicide damage, there could be several sources and please don't blame your DH....it might not even be his fault. First of all, herbicide drift can hit your plants from as far as 1 mile away, and Round-Up seems especially good at making its way through the air as a fine mist and hitting veggie gardens hard. However, 2-4-D herbicides do the same thing. Every year a nearby rancher hires someone to spray his pasture with a broadleaf weed killer. His place is east of ours and it never fails that on the day they spray, the wind will be out of the east! It makes me a nervous wreck because they are only a few hundred feet from us, but I only get herbicide-damage once every 2 or 3 years, and it usually is minor.

Are your plants to continuing to grow but with twisted, discolored foliage? How's their color? Good green, or the purplish-yellowish discoloration common on waterlogged plants that have nutritional deficiencies because the roots are clogged with water and can't take up nuTrition?

I've linked the TAMU Tomato Problem Solver website for you. It might help to look at it and compare their photos to your plants to see if anything looks familiar. Their website is one of the best, but if nothing there matches what you're seeing, I have another website with other photos I can link.

When we had persistent heavy rainfall in the spring of 2007, my plants had all sorts of foliage issues, and I finally resorted to giving them foliar feedsing with liquid seaweed and Miracle Grow...trying to pump enough nutrients into them to save them. They did rebound and grow and produce, but I don't think I saw improvement in the plants until July, about two weeks after the rain completely stopped falling and the plant roots finally got to grow in some drier soil.

The SVBs are one of the worst problems home gardeners face, so congratulations on having success with them. The only way I know to really 'beat' them is to grow your plants under floating row covers or in 'cages' which are essentially boxes of wood-framing covering with window screening. You have to uncover them long enough to hand-pollinate, but they help a lot in defeating SVBs. When you uncover, you have to be vigilantly watching for SVB moths to sneak in while you're hand-pollinating and before you replace the floating row cover or cage.

We have squash just coming out of our ears because the SVBs haven't found our plants yet. I'm not complaining though, because the SVBs can arrive and wreak havoc any time. We're enjoying it fresh while we can and I'm freezing the excess for cooked squash and squash casserole later on after the fresh harvest ends.

For cottontail rabbits, we put out a little handful of henscratch (songbird seed mixes would work too) for them just after dinner every evening. They come to that same location every night and eat it, so they are 'trained' to eat at that spot. Sometimes, when our granddaughter is here, she overfeeds them and her little 'handful' feeds them for several days. We have acreage, so we have 4 or 5 spots where we put the seed for them and sometimes they are sitting 20-30 feet from those areas in the evening just waiting for us to come feed them. We have a good garden fence, but rabbits....especially young, small ones can often find their way through or underneath fencing, so training them to eat the food we put out for them works for us. I've only had damage to one plant (a bean plant) this year that I think might be rabbit damage, and it was (ironically) in our granddaughter's Peter Rabbit garden of all places.

As a bonus, some years the baby rabbits come together as a group (but without Mama, who I assume is watching from somewhere close by) to eat and they don't just creep up quietly to the little piles of seed like a more mature rabbit does. Oh, no, they don't! They run, hop, skip, jump, tumble, roll around like playful puppies and put on a really big entertainment show for us. It is hysterical. This year there are 3 young rabbits who come together about 2 to 3 times a week. We have nicknamed them Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail. They don't mind us watching them from a distance, but they are smart and vary their routine. For example, one day they'll come eat at the pile south of the garden, and then the next day they might go to the one 200' away that is west of the barn, or to one in the middle between the garden and barn that is near the fruit trees.

Once coyotes show up to hunt the rabbits (usually about August or so), we tend to put the food out in the morning instead and we stay outside and make noise so the coyotes stay away while the rabbits are eating.

Some of my neighbors are horrified that I feed the rabbits because it encourages them to stick around, but I'm being realistic...they are here already and they are going to eat, so I'd rather they eat something other than my garden. I, on the other hand, am moderately horrified because one of my neighbors (and I love this woman and call her MeeMaw) feeds a coyote that lives on her place! Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I appreciate that she feels compassion for a hungry coyote, but I'd never put out food for a coyote myself.

Dawn

After a several great tomato years in a row, I am having a non-great tomato year. All the kids are going to be disappointed with the salsa inventory this summer. Like Laura, we got a 5-inch rain on my tomatoes, they got leaf curl and recovered only after I MG'd their foliage a couple of times. Now, they are setting sporadic fruit. I haven't had to "beat" my tomatoes in years, but did that this a.m. with my walking stick.

On a positive note, I did have the earliest tomatoes I have ever had--Memorial Day weekend! On a negative note, they were semi-mealy and not much flavor. After five inches of rain on this fruit set, I didn't expect much. On a positive note, I picked four small Black Prince toms last night and nearly fainted from pleasure as I ate them for supper. I offered some to David after I had sliced them, but he said he would have some "later". HAH!!

It's just one of those years. New gardeners, don't let this deter you. Carol, I may come begging with a brown bag later this summer, if things don't improve ;-0 Hope you're having better luck.

Marcy

Dawn,
Thanks for the thorough reply (I didn't see the link though and I would like to - I've been searching online for a few days for anything remotely similar to what I've got and I can't find it!) Except for the one plant that is quite obviously dying, the others have good color - green, perhaps a bit of a faded green, but no real discoloration to speak of - no yellowing, or purple color as you mentioned. They definitely stalled for a while, but in the past week or so have started really growing again, yet all the leaves are still curled (downward tightly) and distorted.

I don't grow a lot, but I'm disappointed it looks like I won't have tomatoes this year. :-( Last year I planted only four plants - Rutgers Select and Pink Caspian and two grape tomatoes of some variety - and had tomatoes coming out of my ears - literally. GOBS AND GOBS of them and am ashamed to admit that a few even went to waste. Wish I had that problem this year.

~Laura

Laura, Oops, the link didn't work and I know I looked at it right before I hit submit and it was there then. Let me try it again and we'll see if it 'stays' where I put it this time.

Don't become too discouraged. We still have the rest of June and all of July, August, September and October--and probably November...before the first freeze comes. You still have tons of time to get tomatoes. Y'all still have reasonable temps and heat indexes up there, so tomato set should still occur....unlike here (my time to whine) where I have been driven in from the garden today by a measley old high temp of 90 degrees, but a heat index of 101. One-oh-one. What did we do to deserve that? Texas is getting the rain and we're getting the humidity, and that doesn't help the dry soil at all. I want to trade my weather for somebody else's weather.

Your plants ought to correct quickly if it is waterlogging. Dig a trowel down into the soil right between two plants and see if it has that mucky, sour swampy smell of soil that's been wet too long.

--If it does, you'll have to wait it out.
--If it doesn't, your soil is already drying and your plants probably need a good feeding to boost them. I'd run straight to the store (or the garage or garden shed if you already have some plant food in it) and get them some Miracle Grow for Tomatoes or, even better, one of the Bloom Booster fertilizers like the one MG makes or Super Bloom (my favorite, and my Lowe's here carries it). Feed them to help them recover from the overabundance of rainfall. In this case, because you want a quick boost for them, a synthetic fertilizer is preferred to an organic one because most organic ferts are slow-release, and you need fast-release in this instance. The plants ought to take off and go mad with growth if their problem is a lack of nourishment due to previous waterlogging. Their leaves will untwist and uncurl and return to a healthy green. My plants last year took about a full month to start looking 'right' and growing at a fast rate after the waterlogging began drying out, but they made an amazing comeback and I bet yours will too.

If you feed them, and see a general green-up or new growth, but the old growth stays twisty, then let's worry about a virus or something. Right now, though, without seeing your plants and based on your description, I just think they're hungry. It could be the heavy rains washed available nutrients out of the soil or it could be the roots have been clogged with water and couldn't take up nutrients or it could be both. When you feed them, wet down the ground and wet down the foliage so they can maybe absorb some nutrition both ways--via the roots and via the foliage.

Don't give up on your tomatoes. Those plants WANT to grow and produce fruit, but the excess moisture has stopped them. All they need, most likely, is a good feeding and several days without rain to allow the soil to dry up and you'll be back on the road to 'happy times' in the tomato patch.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: TAMU Tomato Problem Solver

The linked page is a long-time Tomato Problem Solver page set up by Earl Cadenhead on the Tomato Pest and Disease Forum long ago. All the pages linked on his original post have great tomato problem diagnostic info and photos. The TAMU Tomato Problem Solver is a part of this link too.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Tomato Problem Solver 2 WIth Links

Unless they are just too far gone, I would try to give them foliar feedings to make sure they are taking in nutrients. I have a Sungold in the lowest spot of my garden and after 5 inches of rain, I thought it was gone for sure. It was limp and wilted. I sprayed it with a weak solution of MG and in two days it recovered. A couple of leaves died, but it is a big strong plant now.

Next to it was a Tess's Land Race (my only one) that looked really weak for a while but it gradually got stronger on it's own. In the mean time, Dawn took pity on me and gave me another Tess. All three of those small tomato types are right together so I can probably stand in one spot and pick for an hour. LOL

Marcy, So far they are looking good, but they are not as early as yours were. The only ripe ones I have had were 6 little Tess's Land Race Currants. You should be able to put in more plants until July 1st and still get fall tomatoes. I ran out of room before I got all of mine planted, so I have a few very tall and leggy plants left. DH dug a post hole and I dropped one in the other day and it seems to be doing OK. If you have a place for a few more, you can have these. I notice our dealers still have a lot of tomato plants on display in Grove.

I told a friend last night that she could have some of these if she wanted them but she is discouraged and probably won't plant again. She left the water on in her garden for five days and flooded her garden, huge back yard, and the neighbors yards.

Carol,

Surely you don't think I would have any room left!?!!! And I took my extras to our next door neighbors who are in their 80s and planted, caged, and strawed the plants for them. I have always told them to just help themselves to as many of my tomatoes as they wanted, but know they didn't avail themselves as often as they could have. So, I took the tomatoes to them.

I've been eyeing my big ol' mostly fruitless tomato plants and trying to make the decision to pull and replant. Haven't made the decision yet. I figured I could get replacement plants around here. I planted too many Arkansas Traveler this year, they may get yanked and replaced. My Yellow Plum tomatoes have been covered in blooms, but no sight of fruit set yet. Weird, weird, weird. The beatings will continue until morale improves, I guess.

Marcy

Marcy, I wouldn't give up on Arkansas Traveler because I think they will produce. They are late season tomatoes and listed at 85 days. I didn't plant them this year but have had good luck with them in the past. Most everything I have is setting fruit, but some is much heavier than others. I think we are impatient because it is hot and we think it should be time for tomatoes. Friends that have gardened here for years tell me they shoot for the first full sized tomato on the 4th of July. I have had them as early as the 4th of June, but I used WOW and covered many times. This year I didn't put them in the ground until it was safe, but I think I will still have tomatoes by very early July. I think I started my first flat of seeds on Feb 21, but I kept them small as long as possible so I could move them out on good days.

I am flicking my tomatoes half to death and I finally see one teeny tomato on my Royal Hillbilly! So I'm holding out hope for the rest.

I have never saved seed before, but I was thinking about saving from the good producers, sprouting indoors (I have shoplights and a small indoor system for my herbs), and planting FALL tomatoes this year. Oh my, I didn't even know you could do such a thing!

Is there a general rule of thumb for when to start growing fall tomatoes here? I could have sworn that I read somewhere that the seeds should be in by mid to late July.

Joellenh - IMO you don't need to waste your money on the electricity. Take a gallon milk jug and cut around the center of it, stopping just before you get to the handle. That will create a hinge so you can open and close the container. Throw the little lid (cap) away. Poke many holes in the bottom of the jug and put at least 4 inches of potting soil in it. Not seed starting mix, just plain ole damp potting soil. Poke a hole about half inch above and below the cut and exactly opposite the handle. This will be to run a bag tie through so you can keep the jug closed until you get germination. Scatter your seeds on top of the soil and press them down enough to ensure contact with the soil, or sprinkle a little more soil on top of them. Set the closed jug outside in a shady place until you see sprouts. When they sprout, open the jug and leave it open and move to dappled shade. Keep it watered well and in a few days it will be ready for the sun. No damping off, no lights to worry about and almost no harding off. When they get their first real leaves, you can transplant to cups or pots until you are ready to put them in the ground.

The jug will keep them safe and moist until germination. I start almost all of my fall things this way. Occasionally I root suckers from tomatoes, but mostly I plant seeds in jugs.

Wow, I go through 3 gallons or more of milk weekly with my two kids. Thank you! Seed-a-Palooza!!!!

Joellen - Once you do this you have learned almost all of the basics for wintersowing and will only have to change a couple of things, except we do it in January. You will never spend 14.98 for a perrenial plant again. Start saving those milk jugs for this winter.