um, i don't see anything to complain about here. my gosh! everything looks great! you have sooooooooo many maters! i'll put up with some of whatever disease that is to have that many maters. you are one lucky person you.

tessa, thanks so much.... my friends tell me not to dispair, but the disease thing I've got has just driven me so crazy... ugh... I've read so much and looked at so many photos that now I can't quite figure out what I've got..

anyhow, thank you SO much for the kind reply! good luck to you!

Here are some of your pics, Buck. ;) Next time you can edit them down to the "message board size" then just copy and paste the 3 rd url here (the one that begins {{gwi:1310289}}

{{gwi:1384577}}

{{gwi:1384578}}

{{gwi:1384579}}

Hate to tell you this ;) but other than the overcrowding you look to be in pretty good shape! Looks like maybe a bit of bacterial spot or speck but can't say for sure and the pruning you have done is fine compared to what many folks do. You can even prune off some more leaf branches if you wish to get some better access. But with all that fruit it won't hurt to miss a few. ;)

Your lay-out would be ideal for either a drip emitter system or a soaker hose. Can't tell if the plants are mulched or not but keep that in mind for next year too.

All in all I'd give you an A for this first garden and the plans for next year will only improve things. Relax and eat some more tomatoes!! :6)

Dave

Just noted that didn't come through...duh! me. Use the url that begins with

I'll take your disaster any day! My disaster is so bad that I simply could not post pictures here, but you can picture the carnage - dry, crispy brown stems, a few shrivelled tomatoes (very small) clinging to these brown skeletons, rotten fruit stewn around the base. Ugg. It's a scandal, and I will probably be barred for this confession, and the general abuse of tomato plants. Hope you are feeling better, I think your yard looks great. Is that a beehive at the back?

Dave, you are my hero, thanks!

Yeah, I'm gonna have to figure out some kind of good watering system for next year. I flyfish and take long weekends every weekend from March until June.... I need to make a plan and figure out if there is a way to automate it a bit.

Right now I water with hose by hand in the early am, making sure not to get the plants wet.

Yes, I was wise enough to mulch them, but its only a very surface layer of cypress mulch. Gonna look into doing a nice raised bed and straw next year.

I lucked out with the marigolds, as I had no clue what they were when I bought them... was at the local home cheapo and in the mood to buy plants. But I'm going to discard the tomatoes end of this year, expand the bed, sow some winter rye, then turn the rye and marigolds in.

Next year, I'm going to do only 15 plants and companion plant with basil and other goodies... the bed is getting expanded the entire length of the fence.

thanks for the mention about the pruning... it killed me to cut up my plants I worked so hard for, but I couldn't let that disease sit around. The nice thing is that they are so bushy on top, I don't have scalding problems on the exposed fruit.

Thank you sooooo much!!!!!!!!!!!

sandra thanks, I'm so sorry to hear about yours. I am feeling better thanks, this board is really helpful. everyone is very friendly!

Ack, beehive! thats so funny... no, its an archery target.... my boyfriend and I met at an archery tournament years ago (we both used to travel the us shooting competition archery).... but I do tell you, I've been dreaming of my very own beehive....

for now, the area around the target is going to become my new garlic bed... I'm getting to work on that next weekend for the fall planting....

Garden looks great just enjoy! Gardnes do very but I too go fly fishin march-november for days at a time and manage my crop just fine. I mulch heavily and only water once every 2-3 weeks. It may be different for your garden but that drip system and timer will work just fine. Dont worry just remember to pack a couple of those tomatoes for the river. good luck

Honey I don't think it's disease, it's the oldest bottom leaves getting crispy edges, then turning brown, right? If so it's the sun, I get that here in CA, the leaves just have done thier job, and are now going on to the great compost bin in the sky. They're just spent. Mine get sun from dawn ~7 to about 3 pm, and it, but's it's still intense sun, directly on them, and the leaves do age faster.

I'll trade your garden for mine, dude.

If you're broken-hearted now, just wait till the end of the season when it looks like a raggedy mess. One of the sadder things I have experienced growing tomatoes is how once they peak it's all downhill and they start to look ugly and mangy. They're not my idea of a beautiful edible landscaping plant.

Your "disaster" looks great to me. Tomatoes just take a lot of staking and support. That isn't a disaster, its normal.

Actually, I have a question for anyone who might be an expert in horticulture: Tomatoes are a domesticated plant that we manipulate for our purposes so we stake them up to support the fruit. But I don't understand tomatoes would naturally grow. This is a very strange plant that would have such weak stems to support such heavy fruit. I picture a "wild" tomato sprawled all over the ground with stems broken from the weight of the fruit and the fruit rotting. So how is this supposed to work?

I picture a "wild" tomato sprawled all over the ground with stems broken from the weight of the fruit and the fruit rotting. So how is this supposed to work?

That is why so many gardeners and tomato farmers still use the sprawl or "Ground Culture" method of growing tomatoes. It's the least work, least cost, and follows the nature of the plant. ;)

Stems bend from the fruit weight but they don't break. Instead they heal themselves and even send out new roots all along the ground contact points. If well mulched as it would be in the wild the fruit doesn't rot.

Just like cages or staking, the method has its advantages and disadvantages. Google will pull up many informative articles on tomato ground culture or tomato sprawl culture.

Dave

Doubt if tomatoes produced such heavy fruit in the wild. We owe the native (South) Americans who first domesticated this plant and undoubtedly selected for larger fruit.
Corn is the most frequently cited veggie that could never survive in the wild as is - those old veggie breeders really knew their stuff!

Wow, they look great! Mine are in the hot sun from 7-4pm daily and they have those brown leaves from age. I prune them out and keep watering! But your's look wonderful. Congrats...

fishymamas, sort of, its the outer layer of leaves that is getting little brown edges, then yellowing, and then crispyness... I just cut them back when I see them. But its also happening to leaves that are in the middle of the plant, not the oldest and not exposed to much sun. At first I thought it was early blight, but I didn't see the spots on the leaf, just from the tip and edges working its way in...

On the inside of the bed, I had what I thought was septoria but as Dave mentioned, I'm now thinking might be bacterial speck.... I treated the bed with copper dust for a while, but it didn't do much and the septoria was raging out of control. Then I broke down and sprayed the whole bed with Mancozeb flowable (not organic, but I was desperate!) and that kicked the septoria in the butt.

Then since the mancozeb, what originally looked like septoria now looks like bacterial speck, though so far, no fruit has been affected. When the septoria was raging, I actually started getting some ripened fruit with blackening around the stem base.

I now pull fruit 2-3 days before it would have been stem ripened. My boyfriend wants to kill me as he says nothing is better than a stem ripened fruit.... but the way I see it, if I pull the fruit a little early, then the plant doesn't have to work quite as hard, and can put its energy into developing the other toms.

sprtsguy, thanks so much... I'm going to look into automated watering systems. I'm more homebound in the fall as I fish the fall striper run on the beaches.

Doof, I was so wondering about what happens in the fall!!!!!! 4 weeks ago, when the plants were really starting to come into their own, I was admiring them and then it dawned on me that they'll be getting ready to die pretty soon. When does it happen in zone 6 and how do you know its happening?

I'm gonna try to pickle any green toms i get at the end of the season.

Is there any point in trying to pickle green romas?

I too was curious about allowing plants to sprawl, as most of mine seem to want to....

in my garden, the trusses break pretty often, I'd say about 80% of the trusses bend over hard.... I've been tying them up as I catch it, but once the truss bends to the point of buckling, it appears that although the fruit will still ripen, it stops growing any larger..... the biggest toms are on the lightly fruited and sturdy trusses.

thanks for the info dave!

Green roma tomatoes can be pickled just like any other green tomato.

I too think your disaster look fabulous, and love the marigolds at the base, protecting them.

Mine don't look nearly that good, and I've been growing for several years.

Each your I tell myself they are going to be supported and tied up in some way. It hasn't happened yet...another year with them sprawling, and a lot of them getting scalded and cooked on the ground, b4 they can even ripen.

Sue

This post is a put down to anyone who is really having trouble this season. I expected to see mangled disease ridden plants. Next time I would use a little more common sense when posting because you are either very naive or you just wanted someone to tell you how nice your garden is.

No offense meant to you, of course.

westchestergrower, I'm very sorry my naivete has offended you..... and no, I'm not personally offended, in fact I understand you perfectly.

Until about 6-8 weeks ago, I had no clue what it ment to grow anything, much less tomatoes.

The only tomatoes I've ever seen growing in my life are the ones at a neighboring fruitstand (I'm a city girl, recently transplanted) - his plants are 3-4 feet tall, have 2-3 stems, green as all get-out and have more tomatoes than leaves. That's what I thought tomatoes do.

I had no clue they grow in excess of 8' tall, or turn into amazon-like jungles, or are on the dinner menu of just about every pest, bacteria and fungus imaginable.

I never envisioned the range of tomato plagues could be as numerous as there are varieties of tomatoes themselves.

I also had no idea what a home grown tomato tasted like. Or the pride associated with watching your own dinner grow.... sinking your hands into the dirt, and having the ability to better your plant. Or the utter confusion facing the myriad of voodoo and hocus pocus to wade through in an effort to discover what 'works for you'. (I can't explain how hard it is for me to 'experiment' on my poor plants, wondering what I'm going to find the next morning)

And finally, I certainly did not anticipate the enormous and dedicated following of tomato growers and lovers.

The art of 'tomatoing' is like nothing I'd anticipated.... its vastness rivals other endeavors of mine like flyfishing and horsemanship. I'm frustrated, confused, embarrassed, enthralled, proud and determined all at the same time.

I simply went to home depot, bought a couple of plants and put them in the ground. I never would have dreamed it would develop into an obsession.

But obsession it is, which is why I completely understand and respect your comment.

Please understand, I literally loose sleep over these plants. I've spent hours upon hours researching and trying to learn. I drive everyone in my life nuts. I've cancelled dinner dates just so I can get back and check on them (I don't currently live at their location, and go days without seeing them some weeks). I'vw skipped meetings at work, just so I could badger the kind folks at the local extension office.

From what I'm learning my plants are fairly robust, but they're also struggling and its all my fault.

The front looks bushy and green, but inside, its a dying yellow mess. The photos simply don't do the damage justice.

Plant after plant is cracking and falling down. The entire grape jungle has collapsed upon itself and the middle is rotting out. The potted plants are in a constant state of having too much or too little water.

I'm typically a glass-half-full kinda person... and I really should cut myself some slack here too... but like I'm sure you're well familiar with, after so much time, effort, care and dedication, watching the entire back half of your crop disintegrate and die before your very eyes, and having no knowledge of what to do about it is supremely frustrating and in my naive mind constitutes a 'disaster'.

For some reason, I can't see the loads and loads of tomatoes, I see broken trusses and snipped stems.

Like I said, I really should cut myself some slack, and apparently be pleased with what I have... but I've got the gardening bug bad now, and I've made so many stupid regrettable mistakes, I just want to start over.

I thank you for your comment. I will be wiser in the future thanks to you.

Thanks all for this forum as well, its been the best source of help I've found and everyone is welcoming and kind.

Be well - Buck

Buck- They are beautiful plants and I am glad you are having fun with it. My first response was a little harsh, I apologize.

Pretty much with any plant at this time of year (at least in my area) you will get yellowing on some inside leaves. But other than that your plants are very healthy.

I see you are quite into them and that is great. But through time you will see that you can step aside at times since Tomatoes can be pretty tough. You will learn loads the first year and two. I wish you the best of luck.

Lighten up...for God's sake they're just plants.

haha, lisalu! to each thier own I suppose!

I'm sure the novelty will wear off sooner or later... till then, I love being obsessed.

tx all.

Buck, you have a digital camera, so you can do what I was advised to do. I just got mine a few weeks ago. Take some close-up pictures of diseased leaves, preferably not ones that are completely dead and dried up, but are only sick enough that you can see how it starts and spreads. Upload those pics here.

Tomatoes do their best when they get consistent watering. Overhead watering is not recommended because it encourages disease. Watering in the evening is probably not best either. I try to do it in the early morning, although I usually end up doing it around 1-ish because I'm easily distracted by shiny objects.

I don't consider tomatoes to be an easy plant to grow. Well, easy to grow, maybe. Just not easy to keep alive and healthy and productive until frost comes.

That sort of dovetails into a discussion on at least two other threads about "workhorse" tomato varieties to grow in case all the others croak. All of mine have croaked except for two Druzba plants which seem to be bullet-proof to whatever killed the plants on each side of them. Having at least one bullet-proof workhorse is a conservative strategy for avoiding these kinds of disappointments.

Buck
You appear to be a gracious person, I appreciate how you fielded some comments and kept the conversation going in a productive way. Very mature communication!!
I'm looking forward to seeing how things develop in your garden. If you want to drive yourself REALLY over the edge, you need to start researching heirlooms NOW. There are more out there than you know, and you are unlikely to ever buy your plants from Home Depot if you get into it. Happy Gardening, and thanks for being humble, gracious and not easily provoked.

sandra christie, you are incredibly kind for taking the time to write that, thank you. Its to my best interest to make as many friends as I can here, as I will have a zillion questions and always want to be welcomed into a conversation... and also, though I've completely immersed myself in gardening, it really isn't anything to get riled up over, they are, after all, just plants : )

Oh trust me, I've just thrown myself into the deep end big time! Just got all my seeds for next year in, most if not all of them are heirlooms... also planning heirloom carrots, a variety of garlics, eggplants, strawberries, asaparagus, artichoke (if I can!), lettuces, 3 kinds of peas, onions, variety of celeries and basils and about a dozen herbs.

The tomatos specifically are: besser, big red, black krim, bonny best, cherkpurp, german pink, green zebra, pink brandy, roma, stupice, tigerella, and yellow brandy wine... thus far.

my new expanded garden should allow me 15 plants + I'm gonnna do 2 containers, so I'll be prowling that "if you could pick 6" thread and choose 3 more.. that antie gerdy sounds appealing....

the most fun however will be starting all of these plants... its gonna be tough and I'll make plenty of mistakes, but I'm so excited to experience being in a greenhouse all warm & toasty on a cold winters day...

thank you again so very very much!