My Celebrity and Early Girl varieties are ripening regularly, but the Brandywine and to some extent the Better Boy ones are very slow to go from pink to done.

Brandywine Pink is soooo slow.

Soooo slow but soooo good! : )

Today, for lunch we had BLT sandwiches, well...DH adds onions (from our garden, too, of course) to his, so I guess that his are BOLT sandwiches....and we sliced up one Black Brandywine and one Valena Pink and they are just almost as good as Brandywine Sudduth's. (When I say that, DH always remarks "almost only counts in horseshoes".)

Of course, between the two of us, we didn't eat both of those big tomatoes, so I put the "leftover" slices on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven where I already had some Orange Santa, Snow White, Dr. Carolyn and Sun Gold tomatoes dehydrating. I'm not going to dehydrate these large slices of juicey goodness.....but probably will slow (vey slow!) roast them until dinner time and have them as a side dish. I spritzed them with a small amount of Italian Salad dressing and lightly sprinkled them with salt.

We will overdose on tomatoes for the next month or two, and will put up all we can for winter, and give away the rest. Sometimes I get "tired of" tomatoes in July, but as production drops in August, I start getting anxious and hoping for a huge fall crop.

You can never really have too many home-grown tomatoes, but there are days I don't want to pick, wash, cook or eat one more. Luckily, I get over it pretty quickly--usually in one or two days.

Dawn

Renee',

Well, yours will be ready soon enough! I know it is hard to be patient, though.

Ironically, I've been very frustrated by how slow they've been this year, even though I completely understand it is all about the weather, and we certainly are at the mercy of the weather here, aren't we?

Next year, when I am starting seed in late January or earliest February, and am planting into containers in early March, and planting into the ground in mid-March, and covering up everything during all the late freezes.......just remember, that I do ALL those things because early plants give early fruit. I used to be happy to have ripe tomatoes by mid-June. Now, though, as I have gotten better at starting them earlier, I am disappointed if I don't have ripe ones by mid-April, but that's just me!

As long as your plants are blooming, you ought to get some fruit as long as the high temperatures don't get too high. If my tomatoes are still setting here in southern OK where we have been in the mid- to upper 90s at our house this week, they ought to still be setting fruit in the rest of Oklahoma....well, except in southwestern and western Oklahoma where the higher temps. make it such a struggle to get tomatoes to set in June, July and August.

If your plants are a little spindly, do you think you have too much shade? Or, maybe they need food? Or, most likely, it has been too wet there and their roots haven't been able to take up nutrients efficiently?

Dawn

Dawn... have you used the Walls of Water in your mid-March planting? I have some but have never tried them as yet.

Well, I bought some and I fully intended to use them.

Unfortunately, my entire garden slopes....and it has quite a lot of slope to it, so when I filled a WOW on what was, undoubtedly, the flattest, most level spot in my garden, it promptly fell over, and all the water ran out, and the tomato plant was crushed. I tried it again with stakes inside the WOW to hold it up, and the weight of the water was still too much. I guess I am so used to my sloping beds that I don't realize HOW MUCH they slope. So, for two years those WOWs have sat there in their little packages.

Before I plant next spring, I am going to build a new raised bed across the driveway from my veggie garden, and it will be pretty level there. I think I will be able to build a level bed there that will have room for 12 tomato plants. I am going to use that for my "early" tomatoes and will be able to use the WOWs, I hope. It sits significantly higher than the big veggie garden, and is more level, so I hope to be able to use WOWs to get even earlier tomatoes from plants in that bed. Or, perhaps, to get early ones without quite as much effort and covering/uncovering of them in late winter to early spring.

Lots of people have great success with WOWs. Gordon Graham (deceased), the man from Edmond, OK, who grew the world's largest tomato (variety: Delicious, Weight: 7.750 lbs., 1986) and who still is the current Guiness World Record Holder for largest tomato ever grown, used WOWs and I believe that when the tomato plant grew to the top of the first WOW, he stacked a second WOW on top of the first. I think he used a teepee made from three 3' long 1" x 1" wooden stakes inside the WOWs to support them. His description of how he grew tomatoes is in the book GIANT TOMATOES: Giant Yields, Giant Weights by Marvin H. Meisner, M.D. (Annedawn Publishing, 2007). (It's a great book for anyone who grows tomatoes, even if you aren't looking to grow gigantic ones....and I have no connection with Annedawn Publishing, either, even though my name is Dawn. LOL.) In fact, at some point Gordon Grahan wrote a little booklet called "How To Grow Giant Tomatoes" and it is reprinted in the back of the Giant Tomatoes book.

So, if you're going to use those WOWs, be sure you have a way to support them so they won't topple over if you don't have them in a perfectly level bed.

Dawn