Make sure your plants have stakes or cages that will handle the vines when they are 2 or 3 times the current height. I'll let someone else address the Brandywine issue. The link at the end of this post gives url's of several good tomato databases, as well as two books about tomato varieties which you might want to look for at your local public library or bookstore. Re. Patio Hybrid, some quotations from various databases and vendors: ===== Patio F1 Hybrid Determinate The very compact plants, about two feet tall, are a very reliable producer of lots of tomatoes the size of tennis-balls (or larger), and have attractive dark green foliage. Although the plants are determinate, they produce so many tomatoes that the sheer weight of the fruit may pull the plants over, so it's best to give them some support - a stake or two will suffice. Tomatoes are ripe in about 70 days after transplanting out. ===== Hybrid. Early small salad tomato with red, 4-ounce, tennis-ball-sized (or larger) fruit. Dwarf, 2-foot plants developed for bedding and containers with dark green, bushy, potato-leaf foliage. Days To Maturity: 50-70 ===== Photos of Patio Hybrid, and more comments: http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/30768/ Here is a link that might be useful: http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/tomato/msg0622294625839.html?3

Never saw a hornworm in 26 years growing tomatoes, that is until year 27. Didn't even know what one looked like and had never heard of them before either. Year 27 was last year and anyone who wonders how quickly they can destroy a tomato plant, trust me, it doesn't take very long. This was a tiny tim on Monday. 14 inches tall. It rained all day Tuesday, so was not outside to check anything or even see anything that was going on. Same tiny tim 9AM Wednesday morning. There was nothing but a few stems left and a couple of tomatoes. Luckily though, there was enough left in the season, half of August and all of Sept. for regrowth and toms before the frost set in. regrowing tiny tim This was on the other side of the yard, so none of the other tomato plants where affected, but trust me, i was going through those plants with a flashlight several times a day looking for any sign of them and found none. By the way, those hornworms measured 4 inches long and there where 2 of them on that poor little plant. So far this year no sign of them. A question though. My grandparents had a summer veggie and flower farm and my grandfather always swore by companion planting of marigolds and tomato plants. He always had marigolds surrounding his tom plants. and he had at least 150 tomato plants. I've always done the same thing when I plant them in the ground and when I use pots for the toms, I always plant a small growing marigold in the pot, right at the edge of the plant. I've never had an insect problem before in now 28 years of growing my toms, until last year. That one tiny tim didn't have a marigold in the pot with it, all the others had marigolds surrounding them and in pots with them and they never got any hornworms. Does anyone think that the marigolds help to keep the hornworm away or was last year just a coincidence and I've just been lucky all these years? Fran

Yup, spray it right on, straight out of the bottle. In the research I've done online, even seedlings can take upwards of 10% concentration of H2O2 without being harmed, so 3% won't even make them blink. Its also a good thing to water with straight if you have a plant with root rot. It sterilizes everything to stop active rot, and quickly decays into regular water and oxygen, helping aerate the soil. The only reason not to use it is if you have been trying to create a healthy microbial biome in your soil, because this stuff is indiscriminate. It'll kill the good bacteria along with the bad. But as just a surface spray, the only thing it can kill are molds, fungi, and the like. It'll decompose before it gets deep enough to affect anything around the roots (unless you soak the bejebus out of it).

"Trusses grow between two leaf node. Stems grow at the nodes, just above the leaf. How the two get fused ?" With normal growth patterns you are right. But early spring growth is often abnormal due to weather/temp fluctuations, young age of the plants, interrupted or stalled growth, nutrient uptake, etc. So just as with fused blooms and fused main and secondary stems, truss stem fusions are also more common. As the new growth develops the nodes often contort the stems - you see the somewhat twisted mass of new growth that hasn't quite straightened itself out yet. That brings multiple parts of the stem into direct contact with any adjacent stem material or even with leaves and they can fuse. Given sufficient contact time and adequate humidity and cooler temps most any part of the plant can fuse to another part. _________________ "One of my main reasons for pruning to three stems is so I can get 33% more plants in my given space. This allows me to try more varieties." NC - Perfectly understandable and a common practice. I have no issue with that reasoning at all. I only mentioned it because of the OP's comment "should this be pruned to put more energy into the original fruits" which implies he had been reading about the old claim of 'suckers sucking energy'. I have always maintained that there are some valid reasons for pruning in the home garden - lack of space, support method used, number of varieties, disease control, soil contact, container growing, etc. All I object to is new gardeners believing that it is required in order to grow tomatoes or encouraging them to do it without also explaining the problems it can create or the reasons why they choose to do it. You explained so no problem. For me, it is a only-when-needed option. For example, hail storms got me badly the past 2 days and I lost several main stems. Now it is needed to try to salvage those plants. But had I pruned aggressively from day one there would be nothing left now to try to salvage. Dave