I don't have very high definition on this monitor, but I think I'm looking at empty sepals (the green leaf-like structures beneath where the the petals would normally be.) The petals, stamens, and pistils (yellow parts) seem to be missing. This is called blossom drop and if I'm not mistaken is normally associated with high ambient temperatures. From what I have read floramato is a good nutrient and your plants look very healthy. Keep your Ph and EC/TDS in range and they should start setting new blossoms when the temps start dropping. Look for a more heat tolerant variety. Much information regarding varieties is available on the tomato forum. Good luck, Ken

Hi Everyone! I could talk about tomatoes all day, especially when it is too hot to be outside! Patty, Large-fruited tomatoes (pretty much anything that makes tomatoes larger than ping pong balls) will bloom and set fruit (for the most part) only when daytime highs are lower than about 92 to 95 degrees AND nighttime temps are warmer than 55 but lower than 72. So, if you watch your temperatures every spring and fall, after a few years, you'll know by "how it feels outside" if your large-fruited tomatoes are going to set fruit or not. Some years in Oklahoma, that window of opportunity for fruit set is very small. Other years, it is better. This year, we went from "too cold" to "too hot" so quickly that a lot of people have had a disappointingly small OR late OR both fruit set. You WILL sometimes see flowers form at high temps and still not get fruit, and that is because the pollen gets sticky and won't move from one place to another within the flower. Shaking the plant or thumping the flowers sometimes helps you get fruit set in those cases. The foliage is ALWAYS beautiful in June. Partly it is because May and June usually have abundant rainfall, partly it is because diseases and insects haven't gotten to the plant yet, and sometimes it may be because the plant has been fed a high-nitrogen plant food. If nitrogen is giving you gorgeous foliage, it also is depriving you of fruit. As far as giving your plants the sunshine they need AND the shade that helps them survive the heat, I have found that my plants perform perfectly well, stay healthy, and produce plenty of fruit on only 6 to 8 hours a day. Since the sun comes up here at roughly 6:30 in the summer months, and sets at roughly 8 to 8:30, you could situate your plants where they get some shade from a fence, tree or building and it would help them more than it would hurt them, as long as they get 6 to 8 hours of sunlight. My favorite place to plant tomatoes gets sun from sunrise until about 2 or 3 p.m. and then gets some dappled shade from a large pecan tree. The section of the garden that gets shade from mid-afternoon on always produces more fruit later in the season, on both pepper and tomato plants, and I think it is because that late-afernoon shade helps them handle the heat. Also, with some shade, you're less likely to see sunscald on tomatoes, peppers, eggplant or melons. Ssimon, The heat-related fruit set problems I described above to Patty are probably why you have fruit on your cherry tomatoes, and there isn't much you can do about it except pray for a "cold front" to cool off your part of the state for a few days. The only way to beat the heat here in southern Oklahoma is to plant as early as is humanly possible, which for me means early March, about 3 weeks before our average last frost date. Once you plant early, you have to be willing to cover them up anytime the temps are going below 40 degrees (frost can form at 38 or 39 degrees if the conditions are just right). By planting early and protecting my plants, I usually get great fruit set, and am usually harvesting by late April. And, I have to emphasize, that getting ripe tomatoes by late April is my goal and everything I do is geared towards getting early fruitset. I also raise my own plants from seed, starting on Super Bowl weekend, and have very large, very healthy, very well-rooted plants by the time I set them out. THAT is the only way to beat the heat, because some years it gets too hot as early as May and greatly impedes fruit set. This May, we had a hard freeze at our house the first week of May, and then a couple of weeks later we had several days with high temperatures of 98 and 99 degrees. With weather like that, it is a wonder we have any tomatoes at all. For what it is worth, Black Krim and Cherokee Purple both USUALLY set fruit for me through mid-July, most years, and do set fruit later than many other tomatoes. This year has been odd, though, and neither of them is bearing as heavily as usual. Early blight is a perpetual problem in my garden, but not a huge problem. The more tomatoes you grow, the bigger a problem it is. I create most of my own problems by growing too many tomatoes, placed much too closely together. I do keep my plants pretty healthy by mulching heavily, organically amending the soil, watering with soaker hoses instead of an overhead sprinkler, etc. I do major companion planting and garden organically too, which helps. I'll always have some early blight, though, as long as I grow huge numbers of plants. This year, overall, if I were rating the current Early Blight problem on a scale from 1 to 10, with one being minor and ten being major, I'd say this year is a 1 or 2 so far. I have never lost a tomato plant to fusarian wilt or verticillium wilt, or to bacterial speck or spot, etc. I did lose one plant to southern blight in about 2000 or 2001, and lost one to curly top virus around 2003. I've never had trouble with Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl although it is has been found in Oklahoma (it is a devastating disease). Having early blight in our temperatures and humidity is not at all unusual and I can deal with it. I don't use chemical fungicides because they only buy you maybe 3 extra weeks of production and I just won't put chemicals on food we're going to eat, but that's just me. Everyone has to decide for themselves whether they are going to spray their plants for any problem, or not, and I am not saying my way is the best way--just that it is the method I have chosen. Mick, OK, you have me figured out. Somewhat. I have gardened my entire life (dad, uncles and grandparents were gardeners!) and the goal has always been to grow huge amounts of tomatoes to share with everyone we know. So, when I carry sackfuls of tomatoes to friends, family, neighbors, etc., I am just carrying on a family tradition. I HAVE really and truly cut back though. After we moved here, for the first time in my life I had all the room I needed to grow all the tomatoes we wanted. There was plenty of space to experiments with "new" ones. I have taken advantage of that to try many, many varieties in an effort to find the ones that (a) taste best and (b) grow best in our climate. Some years, I have had as many as 400 plants and 100 varieties. This year, it is about 70 varieties and a total of 140 plants for spring. In the fall, it will be fewer varieties and fewer plants, but still lots of them...and probably too many. For next year, I want to cut back to 50 varieties and 100 plants. Now that I know what grows here, and how well they do and how they taste, I am working on paring down the list to "the best" and "the most worthwhile". For a long time, tomatoes have dominated my garden and, even though I love tomatoes, I want to grow more of other stuff too. I gave up most cool-season crops like broccoli, spinach, cabbage and lettuce about 7 or 8 years ago because we couldn't keep the deer from devouring them in the late winter to early spring. Now that I have a deer-proof fence (so far!), I will be able to grow cool-season crops as well and that will take space away from the tomatoes. Will I ever go back to planting just a couple of varieties? Absolutely not. Heirloom and open-pollinated tomatoes make up the majority of my tomatoes and the only way I know to describe the flavor variations between them is to say that heirloom and OP tomatoes are like wines--every one has its own unique flavor. With hybrids, it seems that many (but not all) of them taste about the same as every other hybrid. And, while we are on the subject of wine, did you know that you can make wine from tomatoes? (I am a treasure trove of tomato trivia.) I would love to have two separate gardens, and be able to grow crops in one of them one year, and then rotate everything to the other garden the next year. In the "off" year, I could grow cover crops to enrich the soil, or cover and solarize the beds if needed. However, since I have brick-hard red clay that requires huge amounts of organic material to turn it into good soil, I don't think I'll ever have a second garden. It is hard enough to continually enrich and improve the existing garden. I don't practice very much crop rotation in my garden and, except for the problems with Early Blight, I don't seem to have any real problems that you could blame on a lack of rotation. But, since I don't rotate, I do work really hard in the "off-season" to put organic material and minerals back into the soil to keep it as healthy as possible. I have found that crop rotation is not AS necessary if you garden organically and work continually to put minerals and organic material back into the soil. Y'all, I picked well over 100 tomatoes today....but mostly cherry, grape and currant types. I think I only picked 8 or 10 or 12 "big ones". All those big tomatoes that have been green seemingly forever are starting to break color here, so if it is happening this far south now, then y'all should see it happening to your greenies in the next 10 to 14 days if not sooner. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Early Blight and Other Tomato Diseases

In my experience it is a bit more heat tolerant than Black Krim but if I had to choose only 1 I'd go for the BK. But tell me this - can you find them a good home with someone or are you just going to toss the others? If so, consider sticking one of each in the spot you have left and let them grow together - see which one does best. You might be surprised. I often have many left-overs and tuck them in pairs into all sorts of places and just let them sprawl - corner of a flower bed, a left over but too small pot, in among the asparagus in their beds, in a row of lettuce that I know will be gone eventually, even in with the potatoes. You'd be amazed how well many of them do. Not all make it of course but most do and produce well. I don't save seed from them of course becuase I figure the odds of crossing is increased, but it's better than just tossing them into the compost. Just something to consider. ;) Dave

Thanks so much for all the info. I tried to shake some of the flowers today. I have decided to completely stop fertilizing it- until it tells me it needs it:) Yes, I have been pruning the German Queen- not at first, but when it didn't set fruit and all our other plants did I started- at that point it was about 7 feet tall but not very bushy. I'm pretty sure we get enough sun back there. The back garden (where the G.Q. is planted) gets at least 7 hours of light- but it's southern exposure so it does not get full California sun. Honestly, in my non-expert opinion, I think this is a good thing. Our full sun plants do not do as well and they need to be watered every other day (according to the ground gauges) even though we heavily amended the soil before we planted because we have very sandy soil to begin with. This pic was taken in the early evening- like 6ish. There is a 6 foot brick wall blocking in the garden about a foot away out of frame- but it doesn't seem to block much light because the sun goes almost directly over the garden (there is no roof overhang because it's red tile). The plant is leggy though. A lot of the (leggyness looks worse in this pic then it was because we had a bad mold problem that killed or wilted most of the bottom leaves- I just cut them off because nothing was stopping it. I've been told that in Redondo, because of the humidity and cooler temps, mold (powdery mildew) is a big problem- it nearly killed the whole garden this year. However, this tomato has always been more leggy then our others. We were not using stakes- we were doubling the triangle wire tomato cages that they sell around here- they're about 4 feet tall- the German queen had grown all the way over the top and to the ground before we rigged this contraption. I would have left it, but the mold is much worse closer to the ground. The good thing (mold-wise) is that it never rains here (Actually, I shouldn't say never, it did once- for about 20 minutes back in early May, and powdery Mildew covered every plant we had by sunset). My neighbor planted tomatoes in the same spot like 5 or 6 years ago- he said that they grew 3 years before they died out... So, if there is a possibility that they'll grow back, should I cut them down to the ground then when they die out? Or should I leave them to wilt on the ground? Or does it matter? There's probably 30 flowers on it right now, but It's always been covered with flowers- they just don't turn into tomatoes. Thanks again!