Your zone is very different from ours so I don't know how to answer that question. I won't use a bloom booster except as I described above to get blooms during a rare summer cold front. The reason is that our weather is so hot in the summer that the plants stop setting fruit. In fact, at our house this week, in just a couple of days, we move into that danger zone of temperatures in the mid-90s. Hopefully we won't stay there. I'd hate to think the tomato plants have already set all the fruit they are going to set this spring/summer. If your tomato plants are blooming and your daytime highs are staying below around 92-95 and your nighttime lows are staying below 70-72, you shouldn't need a bloom booster. Your plants should bloom naturally and should set fruit. I haven't used a bloom booster in years because even though our summers routinely are very hot, I usually don't need a bloom booster unless we are in prolonged drought, and we haven't had prolonged summer drought at our house since 2015, which is extremely rare. If your tomato plants are blooming and not setting fruit, perhaps your nights still are too cold (below 55 degrees). Or, if you are having normal weather and fruit should be setting in the temperatures you have but it is not, then perhaps there is a lack of wind to shake up the flowers. Tomatoes have perfect blossoms and the flowers need some movement in order for the pollen to fall from the anthers inside the flower to the stigma, also inside the flower, to achieve pollination and fertilization. If your air is very still or if wind movement is blocked by something like a building, your plants may need some help moving. There are various ways to do this. The traditional one is to thump the flower blossoms. If you have a lot of plants and they are caged, you can just walk along a row of cages giving each cage a gentle shake as you pass by. Or, if you have a tennis racket....walk along the row of plants with your tennis racket in your hand. Give each tomato cage a good whack as you walk by. That will cause the plants and their flowers to move and the pollen to move around inside the flowers. You can use a bloom booster whenever you want, but don't overdo it. Too much can cause too much fruit set and then the plant has more fruit than it can carry to maturity.

I have one of the same breed. She is 19 and moved back home after leaving her husband of 2 years about 5 months ago. She has my grandson that will be 2 in January 2011. Same here. I have been screamed at, cursed and threatened in my own home until I am sick of it. She started seeing someone immediately after leaving her husband who was much less than desirable. I was unable to drive for a while due to illness. Every night after putting the baby to bed she was out the door until the wee hours of the morning and on the weekends when the baby was with his daddy, she came home only to shower and leave again, which I saw as a blessing. Things are constantly going missing the most valuable being a stainless steel watch, a gift from the president of my company. My home is in constant uproar. Do not ask her the simplest of questions or it leads to a 30 minute screaming fest. Do not ask her to clean up after herself and the baby in any place other than the room they sleep in. My kitchen is a disaster. The cabinets where my dishes belong are empty and the same goes for my glasses and silverware. I have not slept in my own bed in over a week because I have chosen to work and then leave and stay with a friend. This morning she woke up cursing and screaming at the top of her lungs to one of her friends about what a b*&!h I am for asking why she had taken something out of the fridge and hadn't put it back. When she first came back home she was my daughter. I have no idea who she is now. I have managed to get her back with her husband and for the last week she has been going to be gone every time she throws a fit. She keeps my grandson in the bedroom most of the day. He can't be eating a healthy diet even though there is a full pantry here. She worked for me 2 days a week until I realized that all of the money she was making was going in the pocket of the boyfriend. She is paying nothing to live here. She would get paid on Friday and couldn't put gas in her car on Monday. I also found out that the "boyfriend" was drug addicted and had a 21 count felony record at the age of 27. With her personality change, I cannot help but believe that my clean and healthy daughter got involved herself. There are times that I just cry because my grandson is treated so harshly and there are times that I confront her because I just can't stand her mouth any longer. I was threatened with calling the police this morning to get me under control. My next step was a call to the captain of my local PD. I too have been drained. I feel it more everyday. The 19 year old girl who sleeps in my daughter's old room is now a stranger to me and I want her out of my home. I to worry constantly about the treatment of my grandson. I have come to the conclusion that hopefully with the husband being back in her life that he can control the situation better. I know that beautiful baby boy is the center of his world as he should be. My beau is very adamant that he will not tolerate her abusive attitude toward me and has offered to handle the situation of he is ever here when it blows up. I cherish the days of peace and tranquility in my home and long for their return as quickly as possible. They are making arrangements to move into an apartment locally with some friends of theirs. I know in my heart the the arrangement won't last because of my daughter's mouth and abusive attitude. I never thought I would feel this way about one of my children as much as I love the 4 of them, but she has successfully managed to put the words, "I want her out of my house", on my lips and in my heart. I will be changing the locks on my house and there will not be an open door a second time I can assure you of that. I went through more than enough struggle and stress to raise the 4 of them as a single parent. I have given 33 years of my life away to taking care of them and providing a 2 income household on one salary. She is the youngest of the 4. My son's have grown into wonderful men, husbands and fathers. I had only wished as much for my daughter. I really do not believe God will think harshly of me for standing my ground in this and taking the rest of my life back to have peace for myself. I pray all is well with you and yours. I to apologize for being so long winded.

I have been dealing with this for 33 years. I tried everything suggested here. My husband has two daughters. i have no children of my own. i had to have a hhysterectomy when I was 25. i married my husband when I was 36 and happly single. He was too, after being divorced five years from his high school sweetheart,. She immigrated from South America to his small Southern town, when she was a young teen,. She was exotic and alluring to a naive teen. She had horrific underlying issues that to date have not been dealt with. Her mother was married when she got pregnant by another man and had her, supposedly to get out of the marriage. She left her and her older sister from her marriage, with her parents and moved to the United States. They joined her years later in my husbans’s small town.. Seven or eight years ago, my husband’s ex wife learned via genetic testing she had a brother who had used the same DNA testing service. He was adopted I suppose as an infant. Who knows how many others there could be. this behavior reminds me of a species of bird, the cowbird. They do nor rear their young themselves. They lay their eggs in the nest of other species, usually smaller in size. From the time they are hatched they are larger and demand more food. Very often the legetimate siblings die from starvation or are crowded out of the nest before they can fly and care for themselves. When both parents are not willing to work together post divorce about the children they created, put their needs and wants before that of their children, it is going to be a disaster in some way. Add to it someone with this background above, and a dupisaster is guaranteed. I am a young senior now. I was very idealistic when I married my husband. I also saw two teens neglected by a mother who was focused solely on her career. My husband came from a home of very modest means but well educated. he has a PhD in Engineering. He is an only child but spent his first seven years in his grandmother’s home with his parents and an orphaned female cousin (Depression era). He was surrounded by a very close knit family of aunts, uncles, and cousins. They all went to the same school and church together, gathered together often, and lived by the Golden Rule. I was born and raised in the South too, in very much the same way. The difference being iI lived in a much larger city and I am the youngest of three siblings, We have lost our parents and both of my siblings. My mother and siblings died within the past three years. There never was going to be a way for all of this to turn out well. . When the ex wife retired she had nothing left to do but focus on her children and our grandchildren. We do not understand her and never will. We should not have to. But we have been forced to live with the consequences of her behavior and the influence she has over her daughters and the grandchildren. We have not heard from our children and grandchildren in five years. For many years, while the ex was emplyed, we were in contact continuously, very happily involved. We lived n the same town with the ex and one daughter and her family, the other an hour away up untl Christmas of 2019.. In the beginning I thought it would be good for my husband’s ex and I to have a courteous relationship in order to manage the girls activities and stop the obvious and normal game playing children of divorce do to get what they want. I found out quickly that was never going to happen. I love my step daughters and grandchildren. so I did the best I could. But no matter what I did, I stepped on the ex wife’s toes, Multiply thar by two girls who were starved for what their mother could or would not give them for most of their lives. We got tired of being hurt by these two daughters and their mother. They abandoned us over a flurry of insane activy involving a divorced stepdaughter. She divorced her husband of 21 years in record time. They had accrued a lot of property, lived in a million dollare home. My stepdaughter drove a new Mercedes Benz. Six weeks after the divorce was finalized she got involved with a man who did not make enough money to pay his $350 rent and borrowed money from her. He lived in a hovel, with barely any decent furnishings, his clothing piled waist high in the corners of the room he slept in. He did not even empty his mailbox of junk mail. Instead he let it spill onto the ground and carved a niche out of what was packed into the box. He spent his days hanging out in a cafe, his nights in a bar, surrounded by women half his age. At nearly 50 years old he had nothing to show for his existence other than a short lived marriage that produced no children. He has a Bachelor’s degree in History. When my stepdaughter brought him to meet us he was dirty, unshaven, disrespectful, and talked only about beer and his mutt dogs. All of our red flags went up and have stayed up since. He has never done anuthing to change the first impression we had of him. He has only made it worse. My stepdaughter moved him in on top of her children, devastated by a divorce they were too young to understand or see coming. At some point thay went to the courthouse and got married. We do not know when. They had a coming out party in my stepdaughter’s home, calling it a Christmas party. We were traveling and unable to attend. When we learned of the marriage we were shocked. My stepdaughter had never spoken well of this man to us. She swore to us she had no plans of getting married. But when we reacted the way we did she flew into a rage. This was the beginning of the end. She was estranged from her mother who had desperately been trying to win her daughter back. Suddenly the perfect opportunity arose. Her mother fully embraced this creature my stepdaughter married. Thus began the campaign against us. Cruelty began first, hen alienation. we were so very naive about what was going on. Mockery and amusement at our bewilderment was constant. Then alienation when I confronted my stepdaughters’ behavior. All of this took too much out of us, We spent one last holiday season alone, surrounded by family, and two days later moved from our home of over 40 years. it is not easy beginning a new life at our ages but is so much better than how we were living. We love where we live no, which is on the opposite side of the continent from all of the pain and insanity. If the damage done does not cause us to lose our lives sooner than later then we have a chance at happiness again.

I don't doubt that there are some kids who learn how to be manipulative at a young age ---often because they are not encouraged to express their needs/upsets directly, just like with adults--- but it just seems like an inordinate amount of stepchildren are perceived this way as opposed to bio-children, even the same children. Some of the discrepancy could be semantics. Behavior that one person (probably the kid's bio-parent) would call "testing the limits" is often perceived as "manipulation" by another person (often the kid's step-parent). The two concepts have in common that the kid finds indirect ways to make a point, or express a feeling or a desire that goes against some rule or disrupts the status quo. But the words connote different things. "Testing limits" is something that --depending on youer personality/ideology-- can be seen as natural, clever, even instinctual, even brave and admirable. "Manipulation" suggests deviousness of a slightly diabolical sort... it suggests a certain corrupted character. And when it's applied to a child it suggests an unnatural amount of this corruption and deceptiveness, to the point of being ominous. I would describe what SS did with the chair as "testing the limits". It's a valid question he asked with his actions, when he disrupted the status quo for that moment. The limits he was testing are vague and undefined. He was trying to determine what these limits actually are, and why they exist. Not saying at all that SS was totally 'innocent', or 'an angel' when he sat in that chair. I totally agree that he had an intent in doing so, and it was to disrupt the status quo for the purpose of questioning why it is what it is. But I don't see how this was so bad, or wrong, or how this should affect how his father perceives him or how much affection he is shown. Besides, kids don't have to be totally 100% innocent, or angels, or unquestioning to still be basically normal, healthy, lovable kids. It also seems that you took your upset about your husband not treating the tax refund as communal money out on the kid... kind of a half-subconscious tit-for-tat game... presumably because you didn't directly express any upset to your husband about the division. Instead of saying "hey, DH, I'm a little ticked that you're doing 'mine vs. yours' with the refund", you complained to him about his son sitting in YOUR son's chair. Is that manipulation? Whose behavior bothered you more: SS or DH?