Am interested in your Pink Climber, Costuluto Genovese & Jellybean - Red & Yellow. I have a nice varied assortment of basils - Italian sourced seed & some Thai as well. I also have Italian parsley (seed from Italy), Italian zucchini, black kale & several varieties of sunflower seed (Baker creek) if any of those interest you... Also have a pretty good collection of saved tomato seed from last year - Bt & permethrin hoping...

It makes a big difference what varieties you planted also and if you got them in early before the extreme heat hit. Find out what tomatoes produce well in your area. Some varieties take all summer to produce and if it gets hot they may not set fruit. It was unusually hot here last year so I only had tomatoes from plants put in early under walls of water. The ones planted at the proper time did not set fruit. It very well could be the excessively fertile soil or the lack of light. Can you trim a limb or two and get more light? Do you have a spot with more light?

I haven't grown potatoes, except in 55 gallon plastic drums. I have raised beds and containers and have been growing tomatoes in the same spots for about 8 years. This year (last fall) I "sacrificed" 1 tomato bed to plant 10 varieties of garlic... YES, it really hurt me to do it! The only real rotation I do is on the 4-gallon containers; I try to dump 1/2 to 2/3rds of the mix where I grow pumpkins, reuse the rest of the mix and the tomato containers for peppers, and v.versa, use the pepper containers for the tomatoes. Most of the pumpkin "patch" is compost, at least the top foot or so, and the tomato & pepper mix was about 2/3rd ProMix BX or Fafard's and the rest compost, so it helps bind the compost together. That's about the extent of my crop rotation. I think the biggest concerns with tomatoes/potatoes is Blights. That's why they recommend not following one with the other. Early blight is pretty common. Late blight isn't much, at least not in my area. Tilling the soil doesn't help the problem--it's been recommended to actually try to "flip" the soil to "bury" any traces of EB that was on the surface that can splash back up, since it's mainly a foliar disease. I don't have any real personal experience with late blight, though one year I grew All Blue potatoes in the drum and the symptoms may have appeared, in the drum, as the plants died "almost overnight," turning dark green to almost black with the consistency & texture of slimy, overcooked broccoli. I was using soil & soilless mix in the bottom, covered by shredded straw. The tomatoes 10 feet away were perfectly healthy. I haven't tried growing potatoes since. Also, systemic diseases can build up over time and get worse, but sometimes they are harder to cure, short of replacing the soil. Hope this helps.

Wow, I did not think so many people did not clean them, well I mean disinfect, not clean for prettyness. Non of you guyshave a problem? Maybe the chance of carrying over semething from last year is not that high? Anyway, thanks for your responces. I still like to disinfect them anyway so not to take a chance and have something happen after all my hard work. I just hate using bleach because I always ruin some kind of clothing no matter how careful I am, plus I live on a lake and I try not to use stuff that can harm the wildlife. But it is not like the amount a bleach I use could hurt anything. I was thinking maybe an organic fungicide might work but I guess not. I also have this stuff called Physan 20 which is suppose to be an awesome disinfectant for plants and tools but I see no mention of being used on veggie plants so I was afraid to use it on my cages/stakes. For some reason, the hydrogen peroxide link does not seen to go to where I think it is suppose to go? Thanks! Christy