Bre, She was not a pleasant person---didn't make eye contact, didn't speak to anyone, always had a scowl on her face. I felt sorry for her. I believe she had a pretty unpleasant childhood and seemed miserable all the time. Would you voluntarily tell someone fitting that description that they were doing everything "wrong"? No, I did not. Her husband came over to the house one day and asked me why they weren't getting tomatoes, so I carefully explained to him (he was a very nice man) everything she was doing wrong. (Growing them in almost total shade, and she pinched off EVERY branch and limb, so that her tomato plants, which were tied to 6' tall wooden stakes, essentially looked like miniature palm trees with long skinny trunks and a cluster of 4 to 6 leaves at the top.) After I explained everything to him, he hesitated and then said something like "Uhm, I think I'll just forget I came over here and we had this conversation. I really don't want to have to tell her all this....". He knew she wasn't going to handle the news well and might 'kill the messenger', so to speak. I solemnly agreed with him "I think maybe that would be best", and it took every ounce of self-control I had not to grin or giggle. Had she been an approachable person to whom you could speak, I would have told her early in spring that she was getting her info on how-to-grow-tomatoes from a source not written for north central Texas. We bought this place and moved here not long after that, and I have no idea if she ever tried growing tomatoes again. Dorothy, The first time I grew Bush Early Girl, I put it in the garden very small and it had flowers, so I left them there. I bet that little plant produced 28 or 30 tomatoes that were ready to pick in late May and early June. After it had recovered a little from that craziness, it then bore the rest of the summer. You know, for years Early Girl was not early for me at all (though last year it was), but it always is Late Girl here, continuing to set fruit even in August when everything else slows down. Bush Early Girl is reliably early and produces just as late in the year as Early Girl. I don't think there is a plant around that beats the two of them for reliability, although Better Bush is pretty good too. I might grow a couple of plants on the sunporch for winter, but won't even try to drag containers of existing plants into the greenhouse in the fall to keep them going. I had trouble with that last year. The plants did fine, but in order to keep them happy, I would leave the greenhouse closed up during the day for the most part so heat could build up....and the heat kept the tomatoes happy. However, the lettuce I had growing in tubs certainly did not appreciate the heat and it made some of them bolt. Having to choose, I think I'd rather keep the greenhouse open and cooler in autumn/winter for the lettuce, and just keep a couple of tomato plants producing in containers on the sunporch. I just don't think I can keep the tomato plants as warm and happy inside the greenhouse as they'd like while simultaneously keeping the lettuce cool and comfortable. I always say that BEG is the only tomato plant I've ever grown that literally has more fruit than flowers, but I just thought of another one, although it is a Roma. Martino's Roma will produce more fruit than leaves, and I like the fruit fine, but the fruit on Martino's Roma seems more prone to sunscald than the fruit on BEG. For whatever reason, even though they are not well-shaded by foliage, the fruit on BEG rarely sunscald. Maybe it is because they are growing earlier in the season in cooler temperatures and less intense sun. By the time they are covered by fruit in intense heat and sunlight, adjacent taller plants may be shading their fruit enough to keep them from sunscalding. Dawn

Your plants look fine now based on your fertilizer addition, but one concern I have is that you mention "layers"... Peat moss and bagged "garden soil" can add a organic matter, increase water retention, and improve drainage - assuming that it is mixed in well (and deeply as missourigardener1 mentioned) with your native soil (or delivered top soil in some cases). As far as not seeing any worms, I wouldn't worry too much about that. If it's been dry at all lately (and by your pics it looks dry), the worms will go deeper into the soil and you may not find them very easily. It's nice to see them, but a lack of them at certain times isn't great cause for concern. Adding more organic matter and a little mulch will encourage them to work closer to the surface and closer to your plants - And I would definitly look into adding mulch if your concerned about high temps and / or the soil drying out too quick. My garden is usually covered in worms, but when we had a drought about a year or so ago, I went almost the whole summer without seeing one.

Sundevil, if you are within 10 minutes of downtown Seattle, then you are either WELL within USDA z8b (and possibly technically 9), or you drive too fast!! (friendly laugh) As for the main point of this thread, the usual rule of thumb is to add FIFTY PERCENT to the DTM ratings, to compensate for our cool summers. Anything rated 90 days or more is a longshot although they can be done in normal years with a little TLC. 70-80 are usually decent ranges for sweet, full-flavored late tomatoes, although this year everybody I know says they're just not ripening. Matina and what I think is Gardner's Delight (accident with the labels) are doing OK for me and have been ripening tomatoes for about a month now. It will be nip and tuck for most others but I think they'll be OK. Clint Eastwood's Rowdy Red and Earl of Edgecomb should be ripening within a few weeks. Pineapple is probably a lost cause at this point. I'm not sure it even has a single significant fruit yet. It is a very delicious tomato, quite sweet and "fruity" (as are several of the "German Bicolor" types), my wife's favorite (she told me to grow nothing but that), and it makes beautiful slices and dices with its multicolored fruits (I got red, yellow, and quite a bit of green even dead-ripe) and I've gotten them other years, but it is always a risk with its long DTM. Oddly enough tho, "Ananas Noire", which I think is an accidental cross of Pineapple (ananas = pineapple) and one of the "black" tomatoes (noire = black), is doing just fine. Not ripe yet but big fruits and they seem like they should be able to ripen one way or another. When I first grew tomatoes here we had lots of them in December. Early and late blight hadn't hit that particular part of the Puget Sound yet, and killing frosts are often that late. Now with the blights, not to mention an increasingly destabilized climate, we need to get the tomatoes in earlier. My strategy is to grow lots of short-season and cherry tomatoes, and only a relative few of the big, long-season, late tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes aren't always early, but they are usually easy to ripen. I love "beefsteak" type tomatoes (for sandwiches...or sometimes just eating slices straight), but they are ALWAYS risky in our climate. Even when we have a decent summer, all we need is one big summer cloudburst, and a lot of the beefsteaks, which tend to have thin skin and tender flesh, swell up and turn watery, or worse, split There seem to be some exceptions, but in general, smaller tomatoes are safer from too much summer rain or for that matter not being able to ripen. Sunset Magazine recently suggested covering tomatoes with plastic sheets to keep the rain off them, to avoid blight. I haven't tried it yet but it's worth a shot. I will have to try it soon as the rain is already here, and the days are cool and autumnal. I will try to give it a go and report back the results. Personally, Steve Solomon's books and ideas are too colored with Marxism (for those who are not aware he is a Messiahnic Communist) to have any use for me. He would denounce most of you for your decadent bourgeois elitism for growing heirloom or open-pollinated tomatoes instead of more productive F1 hybrids to make for central committee's glorious 5-year productivity miracle, and that was a typical kind of value judgment that underlies a lot of his assumptions without being explicitly stated (I assume he didn't want to scare his publisher). Yes I am aware that he speaks of personal sovereignty today and yet he still has plugs for the wisdom of Karl Marx right on his personal sovereignty page.

Earlier planting is possible, but the conditions under which most people start their tomatoes (like sitting in trays dangling on a windowsill) are conducive to all sorts of problems. They do better if you can start them in a greenhouse. I don't think a coldframe is good enough, because fungal spores get into them. The big problem I have had with tomatoes here is that there is some sort of fungal disease DEADLY to seedlings--might be late blight--that also occurs in the spring during cool damp weather. It goes away after a few weeks of warmer, drier weather. I wasn't impressed with Stupice. Four plants only produced a few tomatoes last year, were only one week ahead of any other tomato, were disease-prone, and the tomatoes were horrible with thick, woody cores. This year Matina is giving me a regular supply of small unblemished, very round tomatoes. They have a bit of core but not as bad as Stupice, and they are well ahead of most other tomatoes. It seems to be the most disease-resistent too, having avoided getting Verticillium. I think Gardner's Delight is coming in 2nd; they're prettier plants too (Matina is an ugly, rangy plant). I've been to Covington; there's a Fuchsia grower out there. It makes me sad to see the military cemetery out there.