forgive if i'm repeating my reply, but it looks like the one i did a few days ago has vanished. i've got tomato suck bugs as well. i'm in los angeles, btw - have had 'em for years now. a former commercial tomato grower said the problem stems from poor soil, so i've been using lots of organic amendments - coffee grounds, my compost, municipal (but award-winning) compost, worm poop, compost tea and organic fertilizer. have recently planted marigolds but should try the borage. tomatillos growing in the same beds are unaffected which is odd since they're solanaceae as well. i have tithonias growing in the beds, and they don't seem to be helping the problem, also have 2 mature tagetes lemmonii growing within a few feet, and have seemingly no effect. i've even taken some leaves & branches off and put them in the beds to try and ward the damned tsb's away but they persist. i have tried captain jack's deadbug (with spinosad), neem oil and a dr. earth product and none of them really seem to do anything to the buggers.

Tom, those are beautiful!!!it is filling the arbor really nice. Bernie, I see that you master the photobucket and I can see some beautiful tomatoes. I already divided the tomatoes by taste, Willy likes black tomatoes and I made him black tomato salsa. Cheryl likes the fruity ones and I made her yellow and orange tomato salsa. And me, I like them all except very few. The jetsetters that I have were in the middle of the garden. About sun dry tomatoes in the sun I don't think is a good idea because of the humidity and the bugs, I used to do that in Arizona with apricots. You can roast them in the oven at the lowest temperatures for a few hours and they are even better, you can also add anything you like like spices, salt, pepper, herbs, olive oil, balsamic vinegar. Roast them for a few hours till done. Silvia

Sorry I haven't been around much lately---but here are the results for my tomatoes---which I covered during a snow fall last Saturday and pulled the crispy blankets off of them Sunday morning---they are still alive. They have some frost damage here and there, but not too bad. My favorites for canning this year: Campbells 1327---bright red, round fruit that resists cracking, and can handle sitting on the counter for several days. Flavor is good, good as a slicer, but since it can sit around it makes a great canner. Determinate Heidi---very productive bright red paste type, no BER, good flavor fresh, medium size. Handled the heat. Determinate Rio Grande---very productive large oval shaped paste type, no BER. Determinate Aker's Pink Plum---beautiful pink paste tomato, smaller than Heidi or Rio Grande, but peels easily and the perfect size for canning whole. Yellow Bell---pretty pale to bright yellow fruit with good flavor, about the size of Aker's Pink plum---on the smaller side, but got a little bigger later in the season, also easy to peel. My favorite slicers: Kellog's Breakfast: This tomato is so beautiful! It is large and tasty and very meaty! It started producing fairly early and is still producing huge bright orange beefsteaks. Burracker's Favorite: my first bi-color---stunning. It ripens to a deep golden color with a red blush on the bottom that extends in striped about half way up. When you cut it open it is golden with red marbling. Very large! Quite productive. Earl's Faux: a pretty pink beefsteak. Very tasty!!! Potato leaf variety that produced better for me than Brandywine. The fruit ranged in size from baseball to soft ball size. Consoluto Genovese: A small, bright red slicer that is fluted/scalloped and looks like a flower when you slice it. Very productive---no larger than a baseball,kind of flattened---looks like a red mini pumpkin. Good flavor and started producing early on---tolerated the heat well. Azoychka: A bright yellow, small beefsteak that is very early. Good flavor---a clean, tart flavor, but not too tart. Productive, fruit ranged in size from ping pong to soft ball sized, with most of the fruit in the middle. Noir de Crimee: A Black tomato a strain of Black Krim. Earlier than Cherokee Chocolate and a bit more productive. Great flavor, a very juicy tomato and beautiful to look at! Coustralee: a large red tomato---later than I like, but earlier than Big Zac, good flavor. It didn't produce very good for me, but I'll give it another try in a better spot. I'll have to do this in installments. Maybe I'll post a link to some photos too. I grew around 25 varieties this year! Later, Tyffanie

I think I've got it on the border of Hartford/Litchfield counties. The Glacier tomatoes are about finished anyway, will pull them this weekend, but I see stem lesions on the Bloody Butchers next to them. Do the spots scrape off with a fingernail, or do they go deeper into the tissue? Not seeing sporulation. Might not be LB since I can scrape the discoloration off pretty easily, but the garden is looking pretty bad after 2" of rain on Sat and a couple of nights below 45. The only plants really hanging in there are the Sudduth BWs, and since there aren't that many left of any size, harvest will pretty much be over next week. BKs are about done for (lots of dying leaves though no stem lesions), Speckled Romans are falling off the plants (though plants don't look too bad, these are supposed to be Ind. but I wonder since there don't seem to be any new fruit forming), cherry tom stems look really bad (exactly like the picture on usablight website) and aren't scraping off as easily so I'll probably be pulling everything but BB this weekend. My second planting in another area is looking good, but I really should have suckered and strung them up (vertical string) better, lots of green tomatoes of all varieties, again maybe no time for BWs to ripen but might get some Bloody Butchers and Black Krims over the next month if the weather cooperates. And the few potato plants still alive look great! Been awful lately for fungal diseases though - I pulled almost all my pumpkins last weekend b/c of downy mildew (the cukes went long ago), the zukes are on their last legs so will be pulling those as well this w/e, but my second planting of yellow straightneck and my gourds are getting it, I don't even know if I'll get anything off of them. Time to just pull all the annuals I guess and start putting the perennials (berries) to bed for the winter...