All bets are off for green house or house grown plants. For open field growing. All fruits are perennials and most vegetables are annuals or biennials. There are many tropical perennials in the vegetable group but in most of North American , they are grown as annuals. That includes fruiting vegetables like tomatoes and peppers and root vegetables like sweet potatoes. Kale will go until it sends up a seed head, which normally happens in the spring ( increasing daylight) It will stand mild freezes but not hard frozen ground. Peas (Pisum) like cool damp weather. tolerate frost but not hard freezes. Beans go down with the first frost. In the south heat can be a problem in midsummer for many crops, but should not bother you in New York State. I doubt that you ever see 30 or more days of triple digit temps. There are many annual flowers, even perennials have their season. I doubt that you have roses blooming in january unless you are using a green house. In general tho, treat your vegetables as you would annual flowers and you will be ok.

Focus on SALT in every form. Too much fertilizer, soil with salt buildup or water (especially if you have a softening unit) are all potential sources. Many things could contribute, even a well meaning spray or any mineral taken up by the plants in higher amounts. When you mention leaves on the tallest plants are these leaves affected high or low on the plants? Typically higher leaves (newer growth) damaged indicate toxocity of a more mobile nutrient. Light might be a factor but is usually expressed as an overall lighter green color.

The first hospital that I ever worked in was a small one in the downtown of my smallish hometown. Every Thursday the same thing was served for lunch in the cafeteria -- soup beans and cornbread -- and every Thursday the cafeteria would be packed with people coming from all the offices and shops for lunch. My mother's split pea soup is something I think of when the weather starts to get chilly, and my grandmother's green beans and chicken'n'dumplings. Cornbread was usually eaten with chili (Cincinnati style) at my house. Apples are something else that I associate with childhood. Although we had a couple of apple trees on our property, they were Red Delicious which none of us particularly cared for. My parents would take us all out to a local orchard and select 2 or 3 different varieties - Winesap for one, always my favorite- and buy a couple bushels to keep in the cold storage room over the winter. Mom would make applesauce and pies from the supply and we of course ate them out of hand. I still drive nearly an hour away to the only orchard that I know of that has Wealthy apples, to get some for my pies.

Kim, Those are some of my favorites too. I don't know if I've ever had a black or purple tomato I didn't like, though there are some that are better than others. Snow White and Super Snow White, along with the smaller but similar Dr. Carolyn, are long-time favorites of ours. I simply haven't grown them lately because I cut back so much on how many small tomatoes we grow. Jennifer, Cravings for fresh tomatoes in January are normal. We still have several gallons of whole, frozen tomatoes in the big chest freezer out in the garage. While eating a frozen and then thawed tomato is not the same as eating a fresh one, you still get a decent flavor and aroma---but, of course, not the same texture at all. I don't care---at least the flavor is more or less right. Tomato cravings have, at times, driven me to buy a grocery store tomato in January or February, which, of course, is a horrible mistake. If I feel I must buy a tomato in January, I buy the little bite sized ones---I like the ones that come in the little round plastic containers with lids. They aren't the same as fresh, home-grown tomatoes but I can toss a handful on a salad and feel like I am eating something that is close to being a real tomato. I always, however, regret buying a large, roundish-squareish (they are bred to fit 'just so' into those big shipping boxes), reddish-orangeish tomato imposter at the store. Not only is the texture wrong but the flavor is immensely lacking, if there is any flavor at all. Central Market always has a huge variety of 'heirloom' or open-pollinated tomatoes in all colors in stock all winter long and one year I convinced myself that they looked so much like home-grown tomatoes that they might be worth buying. That was a mistake. They looked like tomatoes. They maybe had slightly better texture than normal grocery store tomatoes. The problem? The flavor was awful. They didn't taste like tomatoes, at least not like the tomatoes we grow in our gardens. Even worse, they had a vaguely chemical flavor, which led me to believe they likely were being grown hydroponically in greenhouses.....and I don't like tomatoes with that vague chemical flavor. So, can we poor, fresh tomato-starved gardeners trust a grocery store tomato in January? Sadly, no, we cannot......and the cravings become almost unbearable. I cook a lot with our frozen or canned tomatoes in January through March, but it certainly isn't the same as having fresh ones. I probably cook with frozen or canned tomatoes from our garden weekly in winter, and at least the cooked tomatoes make the house smell yummy, and we enjoy eating them, but it still is not at all the same thing as having fresh tomatoes from the garden. George, I agree with everything you said, but since I grow so many, I grow some of those big large ones anyway---I just know that must years those big ones will not be producing fruit for us in July and August, even though they'll produce well until that heat sets in. I have found that with early planting of the big varieties (and by early I mean in earliest March with the protection of frost blankets as needed), we can get a huge harvest from them from late May through early July and by the time the large-fruited varieties are giving out in the heat, the smaller-fruited varieties are going strong. If I were constrained by space, I'd grow the usual heat lovers here---Sioux, Super Sioux, Porter (not a favorite, but it does produce in the heat), Fantastic, Super Fantastic, Marion and Early Girl. Oh, and any of the Heinz varieties---though I use them mostly for canning, they still are okay for fresh eating and are very prolific even in the heat. Y'all, one way to help with the fresh tomato cravings in winter is to slice and halfway dehydrate some of them in summer. Then, stack the slices, with parchment paper between them so they do not freeze into a big lump, and put them in the freezer. When you are craving a home-grown tomato in winter, take out your frozen slices, and use them to make BLT sandwiches. Only let them thaw out a little bit more than halfway so that they are still firm and not too mushy. Is it the same as a real BLT in-season with fresh tomatoes? Nope, nope, nope, but it isn't too bad, all things considered. They key is that you've already removed a lot of the water by partially dehydrating them before freezing them, and then you're eating them while they are still partially frozen so that their texture isn't hopelessly soft and watery. Sometimes we just have to settle for less (a lot less) than tomato perfection in winter time. Dawn