Thanks for the information. I'll have to "look up" plum curculio -- have no idea of what that is. Also I guess I should get another plum tree for pollination. I am running out of space -- would a 22" pot be satisfactory for a "dwarf plum tree" (if there is such a thing). Any recommendations of sources of a good quality plum tree. Oddly, I have had more luck with Home Depot than Anderson's Nursery ... and they offer far better customer support. I hope this can be corrected pretty soon ... I'm no "spring chicken"!!

Hi all!! I'm new to growing gourds, and while I know this is a pumpkin thread, I have been looking for an answer to why my luffa vine's female flower's start out appearing healthy and happy, but soon turn yellow and never full mature. I'm wondering if the same explanation might apply to this branch of the gourd family as well. I've had some healthy female flowers, 7 to be exact, on a vine that is easily 30 feet long (with all of its branch offs). I'm very mindful of the females because I'm told that one healthy vine can support up to 30 good sized loofah (luffa) gourds. I currently have 5 growing, and I believe a 6th was successfully pollinated by hand as were the previous 5. I contacted the site owner of luffa.info and he suggested I might have a fungus issue, or the water here in West Palm isn't all that great, but I can't find a definitive answer, and this is the only vine I have and I was hoping for a healthy crop of loofahs for gifts, but unless I figure out the reason for poorly maturing females...there's no way I'm gonna see even half that amount. Do you think it could simply be a matter of the vine needing to grow more in order to support more fruits? I only ask because while it's still branching, the rapid growth I saw over the last few months has slowed dramatically, and the vine may be close to, or has already reached it's maximum size. As best I can tell the vine is very healthy, and has been lightly fertilized, and I was hoping someone that's an experienced gourd grower, if not loofah, might be willing to help a newbie gardener. Any thoughts or possibly pointing me in the right direction if this is the wrong area in the forum to be inquiring about loofahs, would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks! 40Acres

See this old thread: http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/2169768/any-tips-for-increasing-brandywine-production The most important part from this thread IMO is: Daytime temperatures above 90°F and night temperatures above 70°F result in reduced flowering and fruit set. There is considerable evidence that night temperature is the critical factor in setting tomato fruit, the optimal range being 59° to 68°F. With night temperatures much below or above this critical range, fruiting is reduced or absent. So where I live now (on the SF peninsula) seems to be the perfect weather for brandywines. My 3 brandywines are covered with giant tomatoes. For reference, my weather here is dry with highs in the mid to low 70s and lows in the mid 50s... isham4bass, I pollinate my squash by hand... if I relied on the bees, I wouldn't get any. Just put some pollen from the male in the female (gosh that sounds dirty).

Mary, Congrats on the great berry harvest. That's something to be excited about. With the melons, squash and cukes, it likely is a combination of the excess moisture, too many cloudy days/too few sunny ones and possibly a lack of pollinators. Bees and other insects that pollinate melons, cukes and squash aren't as active on cloudy or rainy days as on sunny ones. It has been a rough year for bees in OK with many hives dying off, leaving fewer bees around than usual. Also, if anyone around you is spraying a broad-spectrum insecticide, they may be killing off the pollinators before they even make it to your garden to pollinate your plants. Are your plants producing both male and female flowers? Some years, for some reason not really understood, the plants will go haywire and produce all (or mostly) female blooms or all (or mostly) male blooms. Usually, that situation resolves itself after a few weeks. If your plants are producing both male and female blooms that are open at the same time, it is most likely you don't have enough pollinators around. You can get around that by pollinating them manually if you are at home and available when the blooms are open in the mornings. Hand-pollinating early in the day is important because later on in the day the heat can denature the pollen, rendering it ineffective. Sometimes, in a year with weather like we've had this year, you just have to be patient and wait for normal weather conditions to return. Garden performance can vary a lot from year to year depending on weather conditions. I rarely have a year in which everything produces well. It seems like there's always a couple of things that just don't do well in any given year, and then the next year they do fine and something else underperforms. Larry, My tomatoes finally began improving in flavor lately, but the plants have been so diseased that earlier this week I whacked them back about 75%. Any that make good regrowth within the next week or two will get to stay around and produce for fall, and any that don't are going to get yanked out and replaced with something else. I also have about a dozen new tomato plants to put in the ground for fall. I might plant them tomorrow. I was just waiting for the current round of flooding rains to come through and move on, and now they have. My garden has been uneven in performance. Some things have done great and others haven't. Our rainfall for Jan 1st through today is well over 200% of normal, so the poor performance of some things does not surprise me. If my whole garden had died after being hit with 25.5" of rain in May alone, I wouldn't have been surprised. So, I guess I'm pretty happy that it even survived. I consider any production I get this year to just be a bonus. If my memory doesn't fail me (and I know I'll forget something), these are the crops that produced very good to great harvests so far in 2015: lettuce, radishes, cabbage, potatoes, sweet corn, green beans (both pole and bush), tomatoes (tons of them, with varying degrees of flavor, depending on the rainfall as they matured), summer squash, dill, cilantro, parsley, fennel, basil and sage. The cucumbers (only fresh-eating types, I didn't plant picklers) have been so-so, and the watermelons and muskmelons were planted very late, and are just now flowering. Herbs, fruits and flowers have, for the most part, been much happier than the veggies. The fruit trees, brambles (blackberries and dewberries) and plants (strawberries) have had a very good year, but certainly not the best year ever. Most of our fruit has been harvested now, but I have a young peach tree that still has a few peaches on it that haven't ripened yet, and the figs haven't ripened yet. Onions and sugar snap peas produced a fair to middling crop. The onions had trouble with rot. We got a lot, but only because I planted a whole, whole lot. The sugar snap peas produced well, but got PM fairly early, at which time I yanked them out. The broccoli plants just didn't do much of anything, producing button heads. It must have been moisture stress or stress from the fluctuating temperatures in spring. Peppers were unhappy for a while after being waterlogged so badly in May and early June, but are doing much better now since we have dried out more. I have harvested both sweet and hot peppers, but not yet in huge numbers. Most of them have been going into salsa for canning since making salsa is one way to make good use of watered-down tomatoes. I have been draining the tomatoes longer than usual before running them through the tomato strainer to make salsa, and I think the extra time spent draining off excess water has helped a lot. Regardless, even watery tomatoes can make a great salsa because the tomatoes are the base flavor and the true salsa flavor comes more from the onions, peppers, garlic, spices and cilantro. If I didn't make so much salsa, I likely would have declared the tomatoes a lost cause and pulled out 90% of the plants in early June, keeping only a few for fresh eating in case the rain ever stopped and the flavor improved. Probably the happiest plants in the garden this year so far have been the rhubarb and the asparagus. They grew and produced like crazy, which was lovely, but I can only eat so much asparagus, and this year there was way more than I wanted to eat. I'm still grateful to have it though. Dawn