Welcome to the forum, and welcome to summer vegetable gardening! It's a tough time of year for most familiar veggies, as you see. Humidity, heat, mildew, bugs. Did you see stunted, gnarly, bubbled roots on the plants you removed? That would be nematodes...kill plants quickly. The white squigly marks are probably leaf miners, not a huge problem unless there are lots of them. You can use the "search" feature at the top of this page to find past conversations about growing vegetables in Florida. It should give you a lot of info. Good luck and again welcome. Keep posting with your successes, failures, questions, observations, whatever. It's fun here on this forum! Treefrog

Sheri, The blossoms themselves have nothing to do with blossom end rot. It is really just a physiological problem involving calcium uptake, and the blossom has nothing to do with that--once the fruit has set, the blossom is just "an innocent bystander". You can pick the blossom off after a fruit has formed, but it won't have any effect either way. I think you and I both should be VERY grateful that our plants are alive and producing in this wild and wacky weather, because it appears we are in the minority who are having success. One of my "old rancher" neighbors stopped by to see me yesterday. He said he was being nosy and just wanted to know how my tomatoes were doing. I told him that it was a rough year and that I was getting ripe tomatoes, but not as many and not as early as in previous years. He told me that "no one" in Love County was getting any tomatoes at all---well, that is, except for the two of us. He ran down the long list of tomato growers we both know, and some that I don't know, describing what was wrong with their plants or what had happened to their plants. He described the plants of one of his friends who farms down on sandy river-bottom soil as being totally defoliated ("not a single leaf") and wanted to know why. I told him I assumed they were in high water underground since he was so close to the river, and that the leaf drop was a sign the plants weren't going to make it. He said that was what he thought too. He then asked me what I was doing with my tomatoes, and I told him we'd been eating them. I told him I made a big pot of spaghetti sauce earlier in the week, and a big pot of tortilla soup later in the week. He asked if I made them with my green tomatoes, and I told him I used ripe ones. (I didn't really understand his question----was he trying to imply I didn't have ripe tomatoes?) Anyway, I think maybe he was hoping I would offer him some of our ripe tomatoes---but I didn't. I have plans for them, and I know he IS getting ripe tomatoes, so I am not giving him mine. What I think he REALLY wanted was for me to give him 5 or 10 gallons of ripe tomatoes to take and give away to all his farmer/rancher buddies who have suffered a tomato crop failure this year. I did that in 2004, but I am not giving as many away this year because I feel like the harvest could cease anytime, especially if the rain continues. So, there you have it....I am being selfish and stingy and not giving away tomatoes this year, and I am unapologetic about it. In the good years, I give away hundreds of tomatoes, but in the bad years, everyone else is on their own. After what I have had to go through to get this harvest, it is not walking out the door with someone else. Isn't that a terrible attitude--I am NOT usually like that. I really cherish each and every tomato I get this year, though, because it has been such a hard year and a large harvest is not guaranteed. With six inches of rain since Friday evening, I am afraid my plants are in serious trouble. Watch your plants---they can go downhill VERY fast at this point. If the yellowing progresses rapidly up the plants, you can take cuttings from the healthiest foliage at the top of the plant and root them in water or soil. In just a couple of weeks those cuttings will provide you with new plants in case yours decline/die quickly. I have gone from a garden full of semi-healthy plants to a garden full of dead plants in about a month's time in very rainy weather. Once the sun comes out and begins stressing plants already stressed by excessive moisture, early blight and other problems gather steam like a fast freight train. Dawn

Kenzo, Sorry your having problems with the containers not draining. Couple ideas that might help with what you have going on now. If you could lift the pots and add absorbent wicking in a few of the drain holes, and extend it down to the earth, that should allow the ground to wick the excess water down. Though with the rocks in the way, I'm not sure how well that's going to work. Or... have you ever held a flower pot after a soaking out in front of you ? When it seems to be finished draining, if you tip the pot at an angle, it drains more. So with the bigger container you have, drilling some drain holes on the front bottom edge, then adding a length of something like a 2 X4 on the back edge it should drain more than if it's setting flat. Tricky with the tomato support so that would need to be tied off to something behind it to prevent the whole business falling over. Neither are ideal, but it seems worth a trial, since as is, the current set up is not going to work and you are asking before it looks fatal. I've never really understood the popularity of vermiculite. I assume in some places with some sorts of plants, for some gardeners it works fine. It's only been since the guy wrote the book on square foot gardening that the popularity of vermiculite increased to the point where so many new gardeners buy the stuff and big box stores stock it. Potting mix companies add it becasue folks want to see it on the label and maybe because it is a real, one use product, with the used once potting mix being so compressed due to the vermiculite, it's best tossed far away and never reused even as a part of the next years potting medium. I obviously don't know for sure how manufactures think, but why buy the stuff when there are so many other choices ? Take a piece of vermiculite between your fingers and squeeze. Flat blob results. Do the same with a piece of perlite. Still usable. Pumice is even better and my main choice when I have enough stock piled. . It's really to bad too, because using it is often not right for their plants or region or maybe their watering habits. Resulting in failures and people that falsely think they just have a brown thumb, and give up, not learning the true lifetime pleasure of time in the garden. I too learned my lessons about all these soiless potting mediums way back in the beginning. Rotted some perfectly nice plants to death because of vermiculite. I think you will benefit from some reading over in the container forum. Al has a long , ongoing thread with the basics so I'll link to that, though it is not a quick read. It's a bookmark and work through it thread, over time. Here is a link that might be useful: Container Soils - Water Movement and Retention XIX

So sorry for the late reply to everyone... thank you Jean for letting me know that antacid tablets won't work... however, as for the catfacing issue.... it is only on a few tomatoes and the temps were in the upper 80s when I put this one seedling in the final pot. Seysonn, no fruits were touching the soil. I just made sure to start to water the pots everyday to keep the soil moist as you both advised. Interesting that BER is associated with cooler temperatures as here in Dubai I planted while it was in the low 90s/high 80s. Vince, it was indeed the early ones. The first 7 tomatoes all ended up with BER but all the others that came after that look fine so far, though a few have a bit of zippering. Interestingly, BER was only an issue with the first plant that I was able to plant the earliest (November 14th I think) as I only had one 20 gallon fabric pot. The other 4 plants were planted a month later in lower 80s temperatures and none of the tomatoes on those plants are showing signs of BER.