In previous years I have coddled my tomato babies and used different contraptions to protect them from inclement weather. I usually have great success. This year, I can barely spare 5min away from my baby girl to sneak into the garden to see how the maters are doing. They aren't doing so great. So, from my original list, I have had to do a few replacements with whatever I could find from the "big box" stores or local plant sales. 1.Great White (need a beefsteak) UPDATE - DEAD 2.Purple Calabash (hoping for taste since I liked purple prince) UPDATE - 1 barely alive (Jbox) 3.Green Sausage (novelty) UPDATE - DEAD 4.Purple Prince (LOVE the taste) UPDATE - DEAD 5.Polish Linguisa (need a paste!) UPDATE - Pretty sure it will be dead when I get home today. 6.Black Cherry (hoping for taste and early) UPDATE - Really DEAD 7.Sungold (last year sucked, give it another chance) UPDATE - One of 4 tomatoes I had in 2 J-Boxes(Josho) that is alive 8.Stupice (early) UPDATE - Not sure actually. Suckers are forming where the original branches were sunburned and windwracked (Jbox) 9.SilveryFirTree (for the foliage) UPDATE - I give it 45% survival chance at this stage 10.Oxheart (need a regular red!) UPDATE - ALIVE! One of 4 in jbox. Managed to find - Red Zebra - Amish Paste Box Stores - Lemon Boy - Sweet Million Will probably get something like beefsteak etc. .Will cross my fingers and pray the rest survives!

I like to call this picture, "Tuesday": Two Costoluto Genovese, Two Cherokee Purple, One Eva Purple Ball, One Roma, One Acorn Squash, Four Serrano Peppers, and a whole bunch of Sungolds. The CP's are that split and the CG's have a bit of sunburn, but all in all, a good day! :-)

Hopefully in a week or two I'll have some nice pics of ripe tomatoes lining my kitchen counter. For now, I've harvested about 6 Stupices, 3 Bush Goliaths, 2 Isis Candies, and 10 Red Currants. Not quite exciting enough for a group photo. ;) My Opalkas are the most monstrous plants I've ever grown. One is 7' tall 60 days after being set out in the garden, and these plants are thick and bushy. They're putting on quite a few fruit now, so I'm not worried that there over-fertilized. Just ridiculously vigorous. Stupice has been producing for me, and I have good-sized green fruit on Earl's Faux, Kellogg's Breakfast, Orange Russian, Giant Belgium and Black from Tula. The Opalka plants: Some Opalka fruit - probably 2 weeks to ripe on these. Red Currant in a container - loaded with trusses of blooms and some branched trusses with up to 30 fruit: Fruit load on my Stupice:

digdirt2: Yes, have numerous times as has Carolyn, Mule and several others have both here and on Tomatoville (as you know gb) as it has also been discussed ad infinitem on that forum. And yet, nobody has actually provided a reference. And people keep calling it a "membrane" that "seals", even though an abscission zone is not a membrane and does not seal in tomato fruit. <The original research papers were out of Kansas State University AG research station I recall and have been referenced in hundreds of articles over the years. > And yet, nobody here or at tville has ever managed to point to an actual reference in any of these hundreds of articles. I find this odd. <The research is based on the changing chemical nature of the vasculature structure between the pedicle and the abscission zone of the fruit as they ripen.> I'm going to guess that you haven't actually read the article. I actually had a friend with access look up this article for me a year or two ago, and I read it. And the article is about how, in maturing tomato fruit, the xylem (water transport vasculature) decreases and all transport of wet and dry matter into a maturing tomato fruit is taken over by the phloem (dry matter transport vasculature). It says nothing about a stop to transport of dry matter into a tomato. It certainly says nothing to support the claim that ONLY water enters a tomato from color break until it's picked and its implications actually debunk that idea. <Many scientific studies: Tomato fruit abscission studies> Did you read your search results? They have nothing to do with the question at hand and most of them are about the no-joint gene variation in which an abscission zone never forms at all (lime green salad is a variety like this, for example). <Given all that research is commonly accepted then I don't understand why it is so hard to accept the same studies done on tomato fruit. But some are determined to not accept it. That is their choice but it doesn't make the research any less valid.> Commonly accepted by whom? The people I see claiming the "sealed membrane" are all either from tville or quoting people from tville. Can you point to an independent, scientific source that says this? Because I've looked a lot, and I can't find one. The accusation that people are only believing what they want to believe can be leveled in both directions. And when you look at the actual science, it doesn't back up the "sealed membrane" camp. The fact is, tomatoes continue to get both water and dry matter and volatile compounds from the plant up until at least the point of becoming table ripe. This is not up for debate--it has been shown. Whether most human beings can detect these changes in a fruit ripened to table ripe on the vine vs. in a fruit that was picked early and ripened off the vine is, as I've always said, an individual matter, and whether the average human cares enough about subtle differences is yet another individual matter. But the "sealed membrane" claim so far looks to be folklore, not science.