hey farmerboybill .... thank you for the insight ... i was wondering about those yellow leaves being a harbinger of *not good news* ... i have not gardened for, at least, eight years and have forgotten a lot, as well, my zone/location has changed ... anyway, the yellowing leaves could be from over-watering ... sometimes the tops of the potatoes droop from the heat and the first thing i want to do is: water .... water .... water ... and, i do! in the past couple of days, i've *strawed* the garden in the hope of keeping some of the moisture in the ground, so we shall see ... i live in the desert of washington state and it hardly rains in the summer ... lots of t-storms, but not so much actual rain ...... the potatoes are kinda newly planted ... we did not put the garden in until around 12 june, so they are almost ready to flower (checked at 7 this morning and still just buds) ... it's going to be hot today so they may just bloom ... again, thank you for your help ... darlene

I just harvest my 'taters, too. The first batch was phenomenal - harvested just a couple weeks earlier from my old boxes. My latest harvest - UGH. HORRIBLE> all sorts of damage. Split taters, worm damage and it was in my NEW box. The soil just hasn't had a chance to work out the kinks yet. I was severely disappointed and really worried about the sweet potatoes in the same box. So I went searching, and pulled up the most beautiful sweets i've ever seen. LOL. Go figure. I guess the regular potatoes didn't like the extra water and it stressed them inviting the bugs, and the sweets are just fine. SO glad, I'd rather have sweets! Any way- point is. A gardens like a box of chocolates. Ya never know what 'yer gonna get. ;-) Barbie~

It's been a while since I've grown potatoes, but this year I'll have some. My question, though, is when to dig them. I seem to remember that they could be dug when they had bloomed and the stalks were falling over...if this is correct, it still doesn't help me! My bloom stalks were knocked off by the hail, and the rest of the plants were kind of messed up, too. Any thoughts? I don't want tiny new potatoes, but golf ball to tennis ball sized ones would be ok by me :) Thank you, Sharon

Hi Boomer, Many indeterminate cherries produce heavy loads of fruit. My best producer is a selection of a land race (native) type from Maryland called Tess's Land Race Currant. It is a monster plant and will literally produce thousands of tiny tomatoes...they're about 1/4 the side of a typical cherry. Last year, my Tess's Land Race Currant climbed to the top of an 8' tall cage and then cascaded back down until it touched the ground. I had to use a ladder to harvest from the top of the plant, and I had to prune away branches that were blocking a nearby garden path. It was not uncommon to pick 200, 300 or 400 tiny fruit on one day (but, you know, not on every single day) last summer. You can pick a whole dehydrator batch (that's six cookie sheets) from Tess's in just a day or two. Besides Tess's, SunGold and Black Cherry are the tastiest heavy producers in my garden, and Sweet Million (an improved Sweet 100/Supersweet 100 type) is a close third. Ildi, an open-pollinated yellow grape tomato is another big producer and the tomatoes taste great. For a pink grape, I like Rosalita or Rose Quartz, but this year I'm trying Sweet Treats. An interesting tomato that's new to our garden this year is Tomatoberry, and it produces red fruit that have a heart shape. It looks like it is going to be a heavy producer with long trusses of tomatoes. Riesentraube is a heavy producer of large red cherries and it has fascinating multiflora bloom sprays. In the world of hybrid bite-sized tomatoes, there's a few I don't like for fresh eating because their skin is thick, but they're great for dehydrating, and Juliet, Jelly Bean (red) and Yellow Jelly Bean are in that group. A SunGold type that tastes identical to SunGold but has less cracking is Sun Sugar. A great red version of SunGold is Sun Cherry FT, which is loaded with fruit right now, but I haven't tasted one yet to see if it equals SunGold's flavor, which it supposedly does. To get the kind of production from a bite-sized variety that I get, you have to space them 3' to 4' apart and not do excessive pruning, so I don't know if any of them would work well in a square foot garden bed. One of the best-flavored currant type tomatoes I've ever grown was Coyote, and it produced heavily although it was a more compact plant than most currant types. The heaviest cherry type I'm growing in terms of a lot of fruit on a small plant is Tumbling Tom Yellow. It is a weeping or cascading type that was bred for containers, including hanging baskets. I have several of them, with some in hanging baskets, some in containers and some in the ground. The ones in the ground are producing most heavily and are spreading our horizontally. Some people have had them spread out 4' across or have cascading branches 4' long. The Tumbling Tom Yellos has had more fruit than foliage for the last month or so. Dawn