Wow,llhbeck! I'm about the same distance east of Columbia as you are north and my Heritage raspberries survive by benign neglect. They are growing in what once was a raised bed of manure, waste hay, grass clippings and shredded leaves. In the fall, either DH or I mow them down with a tractor and it's not that common that I water them. It has to be really hot and dry for a long time before I'll do that. All I spray on anything regularly is compost tea to which I add some liquid kelp. If I have something like tent caterpillars in one of the trees, I will spot treat but with something fairly gentle like Neem oil spray or pyrethrum. I'm really surprised to hear about your problems with Heritage. I can empathize with you re: allergies although my problem is opposite. I grew up in the Midsouth and the Deep South--Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi. My allergies will kick up here once in a while but for the most part, they are much better than they were before I moved up here. Go figure. Olpea, thank you for that link--very interesting. Until I moved to Missouri in '78, I'd never seen temperatures below zero or much above 100. Since we've been here, we've had -28o as high as 115 or 116o. Yep, just wait a few minutes, it will change. The saying I've always heard about winter is that there is only a barbed wire fence between Missouri and the North Pole and only one strand of the fence is still standing.

Glenda, It might be easier to list the plants I don't use as companions for tomatoes, but I'll try. I don't put all of these in every raised bed that has tomato plants, but just mix some of them into every bed. Remember that I have described my garden as a crazy quilt of mixed veggies, herbs and flowers? After you see this list, you'll understand why. First, I plant the tomatoes, usually 3' apart and then I add the companion plants in between tomato plants, along the edge of the raised bed as a border, etc. Borage--I usually grow the blue-flowered one, and every now and then the white-flowered one. Generally these reseed, but I haven't seen any pop up in any of the beds yet, so I may plant some seed soon. Borage protects against tomato hornworms. Borage also attracts incredible amounts of bees and tiny beneficial wasps. Improves tomato growth and flavor when grown in the same bed. Petunias repel tomato hornworms. Garlic planted in close proximity to tomatoes helps repel spider mites. I usually plant calendula and nasturtiums to attract beneficial insects and count on all the beneficials to keep the 'bad bugs' under control. My main strategy to keep tomato hornworms away is to plant other plants they like outside of and away from the veggie garden. Those plants, hopefully, lure the hornworms to them. These plants include dill, which hornworms like, and daturas, which I plant about 20' from the garden. I usually plant a few leftover tomato plants outside the garden and when I find a hornworm on a tomato plant (especially early in the year when I have more patience and don't feel insanely rushed), I'll move it to the extra tomato plants outside the garden. I love the sphinx moths, but hate the damage the cats do to the tomatoes themselves, so putting extra plants outside the garden gives them a place to go and helps protect the tomato plants inside the garden. Chives--improve growth and flavor of tomatoes and also repel aphids (I almost never have aphids in my garden) Marigolds--I use the small-flowered ones. They repel many insects. Catnip repels flea beetles and aphids. It does attract cats, so don't plant it too close to young tomato plants or cats that come to roll on the catnip plants will roll on and squash the young tomato plants. (I cage my catnip until it is about a foot tall, and that protects it from the cats!) Basil--improves growth and flavor; is said to repel thrips, but I don't have thrips so I can't say if the basil repels them or if they just aren't here for some other reason. Opal basil repels hornworms. Cilantro--instead of harvesting it, leave it in the bed and let it bloom. The tiny flowers attract beneficial insects. Cilantro also repels aphids and spider mites. Sweet Alyssum is another great plant for attracting beneficial insects. Parsley--If you can keep the black swallowtail cats from devouring all of it, let it bloom. The flowers attract hover flies and beneficial insects. So does chamomile, and my chamomile is in full bloom right now. I also scatter a few other herbs around the garden that attract beneficial insects, including lemon balm, catmint, mint, Mexican mint marigold, sage, lavender and rosemary. I always try to plant lots and lots of flowers. In a good year, I'll have about 30 or 40 kinds of flowers in the borders around the veggie garden. In addition to all those previously mentioned, I usually have Texas hummingbird sage, salvia farinacea, scarlet sage, yarrow, veronica, hollyhocks, four o'clocks, zinnias (many kinds of them), begonias, dusty miller, larkspur, poppies, morning glories, moonflower vine, Angel's Trumpets (brugmansia), pink evening primrose (yes, weedy and invasive!), gladiolas, cypress vine, black-eyed susan vine, cardinal climber vine, purple hyacinth bean vine....I could go on forever. I have found that the more herbs and flowers I have everywhere...inside and outside of the fenced veggie garden, the more butterflies, bees and beneficial insects I have and the less pest-type insects I have. It makes it all so beautiful....but drives some of my 'old farmer' friends nuts. One of them, who passed away a couple of years ago when he was about 95 years old, used to ask me "Why do you waste garden space on all those weeds". Clearly he didn't appreciate my companion plants, but he was happy to eat the veggies I gave him. lol I hope that info helps. If I could only put in 4 or 5 types of companion plants for tomatoes, I'd likely focus on basil, borage, marigolds, chives, and catnip. Dawn

Hi Glenda, Sounds like you've been really busy. I agree that you might as well go ahead and confess how many tomato plants you have because Jay and I already have confessed. (Jay, I found two more plants in a container I'd forgotten had tomatoes in it, so I think I'm up to 120....but I wasn't hiding them on purpose, I just forgot about them!) I'm already at the 'more tomatoes than we can eat fresh' stage, so have cranked up the dehydrator. Cabbage worms and loopers were the worst I've ever seen this year, but we got a good enough broccoli and cabbage harvest to satisfy me. With us, the late cold weather that stalled the broccoli and the early onset of heat probably hurt the harvest more than the cabbage worms did. We're still seeing lots of the white butterflies too, but also have lots of swallowtails, skippers, bordered patch, monarchs, etc. and quite a few white-lined sphinx moths. As Jay said about the onions, lots of folks are having a lot of trouble with them this year, and the reasons vary. Some of us had soil that stayed too wet at planting time and a lot of the plants didn't survive. For others the plants survived, but didn't thrive or enlarge as much as usual. For others, necks started weakening and falling over when the onions were still fairly small. For some, a lot of their onions bolted. The onion problems are just all over the place. With the dent corn, I see people space it as closely as maybe 6 to 9" or as far apart as 2 or 3'. I imagine you get a better yield with somewhat farther spacing (or at least slightly bigger ears), but it seems like most here plant it 9-12" apart so they must feel like they get a good enough yield from that spacing. With the peppers, I've had deer eat them down almost to the ground....leaves, stems, flowers, peppers and all....but not since we put up the taller deer fence. Sometimes rabbits nibble the ones I grow in containers outside the fenced garden. So, for me, those are the two big 'eaters' of pepper plants. Your results may vary. With all southern peas, my spacing varies depending on past experience with any given variety. With pinkeye purplehulls specifically, I space them about 6 to 8" apart most of the time, and have put them a foot part before. My general planting guideline is to space bush types about 4-5" apart and semi-vining types 6-8" apart. With vigorous vining types like Mandy/Big Red Ripper, 12-18" probably is too close but that's what I do, and I trellis them. How high is the trellis? With Big Red Ripper, it doesn't matter...it will climb much taller than any trellis you errect. There's several selections of pinkeye purplehulls out there, and some of them are a little more bushy and quicker to produce than others, but 6-8" is perfectly fine, or up to a foot apart if you don't want quite the usual tangled mess that southern peas can become. Last year, some of my pinkeye purplehulls went crazy and crossed a pathway and climbed tomato cages up to the top of the cages, and cascaded back down again. This year, the pinkeye purplehulls will not have any cages nearby to climb! For eggplants, I 'hid' mine this year by planting them in the middle of sprawling tomato plants 'Tumbling Tom Red' and 'Tumbling Tom Yellow'. For ages, it looked like the tomato plants, which were bred for hanging baskets so they spread out horizontally and cascade, were going to bury the eggplants under their foliage, but then the eggplants finally got tall enough to emerge above the tomato plants, and the flea beetles didn't seem to bother them. Maybe it was just luck, but I think I'll do it again next year and see if it works two years in a row. Otherwise, I'd cover young eggplant plants with floating row cover material, or sheer window curtains, until they're pretty-good sized and flowering and that will exclude the flea beetles. I just planted okra on the 4th of this month to fill the space left by recently-harvested broccoli, and it seems to be emerging pretty well so far with 2 of 4 varieties up already, but Paula had trouble with hers...it is emerging but it was kinda slow and she replanted once or twice. Our fruit is only slightly ahead of yours. Our blackberries are done, and the strawberries are producing well....we've been picking strawberries since late April and they keep making more. The plums are ripening slowly, which is nice because we can pick and eat a day's worth every day so we're not overwhelmed with too many all at once. The three plum trees have hundreds of plums per tree (and I bet I removed 20 plums for every one I left on the tree when I thinned) so at some point we'll have too many and I'll make plum jam. The peaches are coloring up and should be ripe enough to pick soon...ours are usually ripe right around Father's Day or even the week before. The tree is heavily loaded too, but I'll freeze and can a lot of them. We don't have pears or apples because of fire blight and cedar apple rust. I'd love to have both, but fought the diseases so much in Texas and decided I just wouldn't do it here. We need rain badly in our part of Oklahoma too, having had our last good rainfall in mid-May and temps in the upper 90s this week. I think slightly cooler weather is coming tomorrow, but hayfield and wheatfield fires are already happening here. This weekend, the same combine caught fire twice while harvesting wheat, but the operator managed to keep it from spreading to the wheatfield itself. The local firefighters have been busy with those kinds of fires and with lots of vehicle fires. It is a little early for those kinds of fires, but the heat has been so bad and the field are getting so dry. I've watered the veggie garden about once every 3 or 4 days but the containers have to be watered morning and evening. Our small pond near the veggie garden is dry, so the frogs have moved into the garden and I've put a pan of water there for them. The big pond is very low....I tried to take the dogs swimming in it a couple of weeks ago but they had to wade in it instead because it was so shallow. I haven't looked at it this week, and am afraid it will be dry or very close to it. My flower beds have been neglected like yours, Glenda, but I'll get busy on them after our granddaughter, who's visiting this week, goes home. There's never enough time, and it has been so hot that my time outside has been very restricted. I love hearing your updates so keep writing them! Dawn

That quiz is cool. But it says that I sound like North Central. Don't know about that! When dh lived in NC the people there thought he was from Virginia. Apparently our Cdn accent sounds like Virginians....