BBoy....You have a good memory about my battles with phantom seed thieves. My efforts to combat Towhees pulling out seeds include: covering rows with garden debris and then covering with remay. This year the debris covering the first planting is stalks from zebra grass which are now beginning to deteriorate and break down.....trimmings from ferns worked to protect bean plantings last summer. I'm still not 100% sure it is towhees because of the weighted remay cover but the holes left last year were very neat and precise....definitely bird like. jwww

Dawn, I received a report this evening. I'm puzzled. Not for sure if it was for the first two or all four. She says there is no disease issues and I need to quit spraying copper/daconil. Don't feel she paid attention to the part where I said I had septoria issues and also TSWV but didn't send them in as I can diagnose them. She kept repeating you don't have TSWV. I sent an email stating the plant that has it I didn't send. She says it is stress only and they will recover. I know better than that. When I sent the second plant I debated which one to send. The one I didn't send I pulled last night. It had shriveled up to where it was a foot shorter and the fruit was starting to shrivel. The roots look fine and the soil was very moist. I have left some in the past to try to ripen fruit. If it gets to breaker stage and you pick it and let it ripen inside it will be bitter. I have never seen stress affect plants in this fashion. I also had 3-4 plants that exhibited the same symptoms last fall from mid Sept to frost after the cooldown. So I'm puzzled and not sure what to think. Like I told her in the reply. I will continue to pull them as I've found even if they live 3-4 weeks they never grow again even if it is cool and the fruit from them isn't fit to eat. I yank them and plant squash in their place. At least I get some good from the water I'm using. So basically I don't know anything. I know for sure the last plant had wilt. It was completely wilted at 6 am last Sat morning when it was in the 60's. Again the soil was very moist and it had a great root system. I had the wilt hit two more plants. The one in a container was toast in 3 days. When I pulled it one morning even the stem was limp. Being that I've started I will continue to spray Daconil/copper till at least Sept and maybe for most of the season. I've been trimming leaves. It takes at least 30 minutes a plant. I feel the reason I had septoria was we did have over and inch of rain during that time. Also I had the sweet corn on the south side and our winds quit for several days. And the plants were 6 ft or taller with lots of foliage and canopy. One evening when picking fruit I noticed it was like a sauna in there. I think the combination caused the issue. Being that I've cut the corn down and it hasn't rained and i've been spraying the issue is under control for now. I plan to remove all dead and diseased looking foliage although it is a very slow process. It is just on the caged rows. They were the early plants. I've trimmed up either 4 or 5 plants in 4 evenings. I do everything else first. Will get out early this weekend and try to get several done. Have at least 20 plants to go. This evening I finished up a Prudence Purple from George's seed. It is setting fruit good now. And then moved to the Cowlick''s Brandywine. Knock on wood it has considerable fruit set. One reason I won't quit spraying. I hope I can taste a few this year and save some seeds. I'm guessing maybe 20 or more. From tinies to some around 2-3 ounces. Due to the heat I have some malformed fruits. Mule had some pictures on his site of some he has picked. I have some real oddballs. The one Grandma Suzy's plant that shows heat stress has several with big scars on the bottoms. The other GS's plant so far knock on wood hasn't shown any stress issues. It is at least 2 ft taller and I haven't noticed any problems on the fruit on it. But it is fast proving to be a good setter here. Hopefully both plants will last through the season. Both plants are fairly well loaded. So the fruit set on the Cowlick's was the good news I needed after finding out they didn't find the reason the plants decline and eventaully die. I just never heard of stress causing a change in the color of the top leaves and stems to a light yellow and the blooms all die. Some very small fruit set drops off. The leaves usually never curl till later as the light yellow color works it's way to the bottom of the plant. As it goes down then the stems and leaves curl. She said the one almost looked like herbicide drift. I guess that is possible but why not all the plants in an area and whyt does it continue to happen 1-2 plants a week or so sometimes several feet a part for most of the season? May never know the cause. If it continues I will send plants elsewhere to get a second opinion. Jay

I am so sorry for what your kitten and you are going through. Unfortunately, the symptoms you describe of completely foreign to my experiences with ailing felines. All I can suggest is that you get your kitten to the nearest university vet school clinic for a thorough evaluation. Vet school clinics are staffed by a full complement of veterinary specialists with advanced diagnostics available that simply are not available at most private practice vet clinics. If there are answers and effective treatments available for your kitten, they will most likely be found at a university vet school clinic. I wish you and your kitten the best. Laurie

If you grow out plants from saved Sungold F-1 fruits, you will get the F-2 generation, which has high variability as the genes recombine randomly. With SunGold F-2s, people who've grown them have reported a wide range of results with fruit ranging from red to orange to gold or golden yellow, and some fruit that is bi-color. The sizes and shapes have had quite a bit of variability as well, ranging from large round cherries about an inch in diameter to grape shaped tomatoes. The important question, of course, is the flavor. Almost everyone who's grown out F-2 SunGolds and written about them has found the flavor highly variable as well, and not necessarily in a good way. Some people have gotten sweet fruit, some have gotten sour. Most feel the flavor is not nearly as good as SunGold, but a few thought it was good enough---or at least their friends and family liked it even though it wasn't the well-known SunGold flavor. Many tomato afficianadoes, and some well-known private breeders, have tried to dehybridize SunGold to get a stable O-P version of it. None have gotten an exact replica of SunGold, though Reinhard Kraft of Germany probably has come closest with SunGold Select II, seeds of which likely are available commercially from some seed company. Some people find SunGold Select II a reasonable substitute for SunGold (though not exactly the same as the F-1 SunGold) and others don't. Most people who have tried to dehybridize SunGold have taken their attempts out to 4 or 5 generations, represented as F-4 and F-5 and I've seen some reports of F-8, and then finally have dropped the effort, realizing they'd rather grow and eat SunGold F-1 than an inferior O-P descendant. You should know that the variability is not just in the fruit either. Some folks have gotten very short dwarf plants in the F-2 generation, some have gotten plants that have poor disease tolerance. So, since you are growing for market, assuming you want to grow as many fruit to sell as possible, growing out your F-2 SunGold plants is a risk because you could end up with largely dwarf plants that have poor disease resistance and produce red cherry fruit with flavor that might be great (rare in the info I have found online), mediocre or poor. To me, that makes growing out SunGold F-2 very risky and possibly a waste of resources (especially space). Dehybridizing SunGold into a stable open-pollinated variety is sort of the Holy Grail among tomato afficianadoes, and I've never seen one report of someone saying that their F-2 plants have given them an exact replica of SunGold. If you have the time and space to experiment and are willing to dedicate several years of effort to growing out SunGold generations, you are likely to find that the F-2 generation was the most unstable, and you may get less variability as you go forward with each new generation of plants. From that point forward, you save seed each plant generation only from the plants that gave you the closest version of what you're seeking, and which each generation, you may come closer to getting a reasonable facsimile of SunGold. Or, you may not. However, since Reinhard Kraft already has done all that to produce SunGold Select II, you'd just be duplicating his efforts with no guarantee you'd get his same results. It seems easier to me to track down and buy SunGold Select II seeds, and as far as I can remember though I don't know if I saw them in this year's catalog, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds has SunGold Select II. Finally, be very careful not to call the tomatoes you are selling from saved seed "SunGold" because they are not, legally speaking, SunGold. You'll have to call them something else to avoid getting into legal trouble with the seed company that holds the legal rights to SunGold. By the way, with Porter the reason you have had good results from saved seed is because it is a long-stable (for decades now) open-pollinated tomato from the old and now-defunct Gene Porter & Sons Seed Company once based in Stephenville, TX, so saved seed (assuming it wasn't cross-pollinated by an insect and that you don't get a sport or mutation) will give you stable Porter tomato plants. That's the difference between open-pollinated varieties and hybrids, and it is a very huge difference. To get the original SunGold F-1, you'd have to cross the original parents used to breed it (a closely held, trade secret, so no one knows what they are), which is how the wholesale producer who has the rights to SunGold produces new seed for it. I've tried some open-pollinated versions of several different hybrid tomato varieties, and for the most part found them inferior (sometimes very inferior) and went back to growing the hybrid version.