This is only my second year growing tomatoes, and my plants are about as productive as last year. Last year I shook my plants only at the start of the season, and the larger tomatoes (e.g. Cherokee Purple) stopped setting fruit in August. This year I've been shaking them at least every few days since I transplanted them in early June, but again the larger tomatoes seem to have stopped setting fruit this month. Based on my count today, I have just under 700 tomatoes on 27 plants, about 400 cherry tomatoes and about 290 larger tomatoes. Two of the cherry tomatoes (Sungold and Isis Candy) continue to set fruit, but Blush also seems to have slowed down. So far Kimberley and Jaune Flammee have both produced about 20-25 tomatoes, and the fruit on Kimberley started blushing this past week. Of the black varieties Spudakee, Indian Stripe, and Vorlon are producing about 50% more fruit than Cherokee Purple, Paul Robeson, and Gary'O Sena. Here are some photos of the fruit on my plants: The first almost-ripe fruit on Kimberley on August 13th Jaune Flammee has 2" fruit on August 13th Spudakee has 3.5" fruit on August 13th Indian Stripe has 4" on August 13th

Pat, We eat all we can while it is fresh. We freeze, we dehydrate, we can. We give away fresh produce (not as much as you'd think, though, because I like canning it) to family and friends. We send lots of produce to work with our son, who is a professional firefighter. Since they work 24 hours shifts, they cook a lot of their meals while working and always appreciate a few fresh veggies (plus, it helps them stretch their food budget). Last year I filled up 3 freezers, the root cellar (aka the tornado shelter), and the "jelly closet" (which originally started out as a coat closet, but is much better used for food storage of home-preserved food). I canned a little over 700 jars, but that's because it was the best fruit year ever and I had 350 lbs. of plums and peaches to process in a fairly short period of time. Most years it is more like 200 or 300 or 400 jars. What does a small family do with all those jars of jams, jellies, salsas and hot peppers? We eat some of it, but give away a lot more than we eat. My DH is a police officer and every year at Christmas he gives gifts of our home-grown and home-preserved goodies to about 80 or 90 co-workers at the PD. We give the same sort of gifts to our friends, including all the members of our vounteer fire dept, and to family members. We donate jars of jellies, jams, salsa and candied jalapenos to local fundraisers for some of our county's volunteer fire departments and oter causes. I think that last year, each gift bag at Christmas had 1 jar each of jelly, jam, peppers and salsa. Of course, the ones for family members had more---maybe 8 jars. I figure if I am going to put all the time into the veggie garden, I want it to be as productive as possible. So, of course, I'm happiest with big harvests. However, in some years you have to be happy with any harvest at all and this is one of those years. We love eating fresh food from our garden and appreciate the fact that we know how it was raised and that it wasn't sprayed with a lot of pesticides. Now that we have become so used to eating from our own garden, it would be hard to go back to eating only grocery store produce because the quality of the fresh grocery store produce just is not the same as that of what we grow. I garden biointensively with very close spacing so I can get the most out of the space I have. I do a lot of succession planting. My favorite way to do succession planting is to start the succession crop indoors 7-12 days before I expect to plant it into the ground. I often start beans and peas in in 3-oz. bathroom cups filled with potting soil. I cut a big "X" in the bottom of each cup for drainage, and for the roots to grow down through later after I transplant them into the ground. I use the paper cups as plantable pots to reduce transplant shock. I germinate the seeds indoors where I can control the temps and light, them immediately move the seedlings outdoors to grow in natural light as soon as they germinate. (This eliminates the need to harden them off.) At the time I'm removing a finished crop like, let's say, the mid-season corn that will be coming out of the bed in a few days, I'll harvest the corn in the morning and replant that bed the same day. In the afternoon I'll likely use my little Mantis cultivator to work the existing mulch into the soil in the early afternoon. In the cool evening hours, I'll transplant the started bean or pea plants, cups and all, into the soil and water it in. Then I'll mulch it. So, if you were at my house early that morning, you might see a raised bed of ready-to-harvest corn. Then, if you came by at 8 o'clock that evening, the corn will have been picked and processed, the bed cleaned out, the corn stalks on the compost pile, and rows of small southern pea or bush bean plants freshly transplanted into the former corn bed. It surprises our friends and neighbors sometimes when they stop by on a day I've harvested/replanted. I'll get a funny look and a question like "weren't your corn plants there this morning...?). Doing a quick turnaround like that speeds up the harvest cycle. For example, in beds from which I harvested onions the first week in June, I'm already harvesting okra from transplants that went into the bed the same day the onions came out. The watermelon plants I put into the ground that day have melons that are the size of softballs, and those plants have been in the ground for only about 5 or 6 weeks. I have a lot of trouble with good seed germination in early spring when soil temps are too cold or soil is too wet or when the cutworms are too active. That's one reason I prefer transplants as much as possible. It is a lot more work and a lot more time-consuming, but you get more consistent germination, and there's not any gaps in a row caused by poor germination since I don't transplant any cups with ungerminated seeds. For something like southern peas that germinate easily in warm soil, it isn't so much that I get better germination in paper cups indoors, but that I get a head start by growing the plants in cups. If I start seeds of southern peas in cups and transplant them into the ground about 10-14 days after I first planted the seeds in the cups, then those plants will produce 1.5 to 2 weeks earlier than plants that would be direct-seeded on the same day. I've grown the crops here so long in that mnner, that it is easy for me to look at the spring plantings and know when it is time to start seed of the follow-on crop. I even start seeds in cups sometimes of veggies that don't like to be transplanted, like carrots. Since a lot of things don't like to be transplanted, I just plant the cups and all right into the ground. The paper cups break down pretty quickly. If every succession crop I put into the ground is already a week or two "old" when I plant it, I get a faster harvest, which allows me to get the next succession crop into the ground quickly too....and so it goes until I run out of space, water, or time. Fall beans are the best! It is nice to be picking them in October when the temperatures are milder. We just called them "October beans" when I was a kid because that's when you picked them. I probably was a teenager before I figured out that "October beans" was a general name for all fall-harvested beans and not a specific variety of bean like "Lazy Housewife" or "McCasland". The older I get the more I like pole beans because it isn't fun bending over to pick bush beans, but I always plant bush beans in spring for the early harvest, and pole beans for fall, and more bush beans for fall in a good rainfall year. I'm not sure if I'll plant fall bush beans or not. In order for me to do that, I want to see some good rain falling first. About the only succession plantings I'm making this summer are additional sowings of lima beans, southern peas (I'm growing pinkeye purplehull, crowder, zipper and cream types), okra and squash. They can take the heat when nothing else can. I'd never, ever, ever sell my veggies at a Farmer's Market. I've been to Farmer's Markets, I've witnessed idiot customers trying to bargain with the grower/seller and convince them to sell their fresh veggies for next to nothing. and it is a pet peeve of mine. It is unreasonable for consumers to expect sellers at the Farmer's Markets to sell their produce for lower prices than they'd pay at Wal-Mart and it just infuriates me. Knowing all the blood, sweat and tears, and time and effort, and worry and sleepless nights on a "frost watch" that go into growing fresh produce, I feel like the growers at Farmer's Markets ought to be able to sell their produce for more, not less, than the price local grocery stores charge. Raising veggies well is labor-intensive and time-consuming and to me it implies a certain lack of respect for the farmer's or market grower's time and effort to try to bargain them down to a "cheap" price. To me, their work and the quality of their produce is deserving of the price they ask, and sometimes I think they sell too cheaply because they feel they have to in order to compete. So, it will be a cold day in Oklahoma in July before you'll see me selling at a Farmer's Market. A friend of a friend of ours sold produce at a local farmer's market for several years and finally gave it up to get "a real job" with a guaranteed income and I can't say I blame her one bit. Our produce is too precious to us to sell it to unappreciative people for whom the only thing that matters is the price they pay. Dawn

So basically there's nothing I can do? Well you can try the suggestions above but basically this year is done for you as the others have said. That is unless you can baby the plants through until the weather cools. If they are indeterminates they will start to grow and produce again then. But they won't do anything more now. Next year you'll need to plant much earlier than you did this year so use this year as a learning and research time. Research "growing tomatoes in Florida" and the unique situations there, talk to your local county AG extension about proper planting times, chat with the folks on the Florida Gardening forum to learn about proper planting times in your area and varieties that work well for them, get bigger containers, construct some shady areas if possible, etc. Then root some cuttings off of your existing plants or any cuttings you can bum from friends and use them to plant come Florida's fall tomato growing season. Many Floridians report it is the best tomato season anyway. ;) Good luck. Dave

Yes it's the heat, you can try shading, loads of water, but basically it's the heat. During July & Aug that's when the cherry toms keep comming and the larger ones quiet down. For next year, start them earlier and set out sooner (I plant out by my Bday in mid Feb each year, as a convient reminder), once it beging to cool in Sept, expect your plants to put out your fall flush of toms, till then just keep the plants in the best condition you can. (Or you can have 2 sets of plants a spring set and fall tomatoes if you wanna fiddle with that, I usually keep my spring vines alive thru summer, simplier for me). These keep going for us the last few years: Sweet 100 Yellow pear Black from Tula Sungold