Jay, Our weather has been all over the place the last 6 weeks with very little consistency. Some nights it has dropped into the 60s and many nights it has dropped into the lower 70s. Walking out the door before sunrise to an air temperature of 84 was just pathetic. We usually have that kind of heat here at night in early August, not early July. I cancelled my plan to dehydrate the tomatoes today when the heat index hit 105 and the power went out. The power was only out a couple of minutes, but it caught my attention and made me decide to wait until tomorrow. I don't want to have an oven full of baking sheets with little dehydrating tomatoes on them and then have the power go out. It currently is 98 here with a heat index of 105, and we're in the "cooler" Red River Valley. Up in Ardmore and Madill, one of which is one county north and the other is one county northeast of us, they have hit 100 degrees and Ardmore's heat index is 106 and Madill's is 107. We're supposed to hit 103 here today but I keep hoping the cold front will send T-storms out ahead of it that will cool us down. I hope my mentioning the ripe tomatoes didn't hurt you too much! I am sure you'll have ripe ones before you know it. My harvest is peaking a month late--it usually starts in earnest the first week in June and this year it really started around July 1st. I think the harvest will be just as large as past years, assuming some disease does not suddenly strike, but over a shorter period. As long as we get tomatoes to eat, that's all I care about. Have you ever had trouble with the foundation of the garage wicking moisture away from the plants? Is that possible? I wonder too, if somewhere in the subsoil there might be a big crack and the water is seeping down into the ground through it. When our clay soil cracks, I could stand there with a hose running all day and the water would keep draining down....the crack would never "fill up". Our sandy soil hardly ever cracks, but our first drought year here I couldn't keep plants in it watered enough to keep them from dying. After a decade of soil improvement, that's not an issue any more though. I went and bought Daconil but haven't sprayed yet. I keep trying and can't get to it before the heat gets too bad and I have to come inside. This morning, I picked all the ripe fruit I could before I came in for brunch, and then intended to go back outside, pick the rest of the ripe ones, remove the diseased foliage, and then spray. Since it got so hot so fast, I didn't get it done, so maybe I can finish it this evening when the temps drop down to some reasonable temperature like 92 or something. When you lift those plants that are failing in that one hole, do you see any signs of root knot nematodes? Other than something that is strictly a soil drainage issue, nematodes are another possibility for a plant in sandy soil that is not thriving. Other than that possibility, I am stumped. The farmer's market will be such fun. If you get hooked on selling there, you'll "have to" build a greenhouse or high tunnel so you can plant early and have the first ripe fruit at the market every year! I am leaning towards building a high tunnel before next year. It wouldn't have to be really huge. I'd be happy if I could just plant 20 or 30 tomato plants really early and know they'd be protected from the colder nights and heavy rains. If we build a high tunnel, we'll put it on higher ground than the current veggie garden so that heavy rains aren't an issue. It is so miserably hot here that I brought the outside dogs in from the garage to cool off for a couple of hours, and the feral cat who hates all the other cats and starts fights with them is even inside. He's in Tim's weight room, though, so he can sleep and chill out and not have any "contact" with our other laid-back, mellow kitties. We're pretty much in a regular routine now where the house dogs go to the master bedroom to sleep on their dog beds all afternoon, the cats go to the guest room (because the outdoor dogs like to chase cats), Yellow Cat goes to the weight room and the outdoor dogs sleep downstairs in the living room, breakfast room or kitchen. The only animals still outside are the poultry! I am eagerly watching the radar for signs of cooling rain. I do have the sprinkler on right now, "watering" the chicken coop and fenced-in poultry run in an attempt to cool it down a bit for the 10-week old chickens. Dawn

Pam, I don't think I've grown many of Twilley's varieties, but I intend to start trying some of them every year. For 2013, I'm thinking of trying a couple of their broccoli varieties (Castle Dome and Coronado Crown) that have received very good reviews from Farmerdill on the Cornell website. I figure if they do well for him in Georgia, they ought to grow well here as well. I might try a couple of the lettuce varieties they carry too. I'm always on the hunt for lettuce varieties that can ignore the early 90-degree-plus days that hit us randomly in March and April some years. I hate it when early hot days cause the lettuce to bolt earlier than it should. That happened both in 2011 and 2012 because we were hitting the 90s before Easter, which is just ridiculous. One reason I've posted only my 2013 tomato grow list and not the grow list of all other veggies is that I'm still trying to decide which Twilley varieties I'll try this year. As for the seed addiction.....Tim is just happy it is not a shoe, purse or diamond addiction. Seeds are a lot more affordable and don't require much storage space in the closet. Jay, The catalogs and the updated websites seem a little slow this year. I did go to Sample Seed Shop's website last week and order a bunch of seeds from Remy that "Santa Tim" is giving me for Christmas. I also have looked at Peaceful Valley Farm Supply's website, which has updated for 2013. However, a few weeks ago I went to their website and ordered 2012 seed that was on sale for, I think, 50% off, so I don't really need any of their new 2013 seeds. Burpee has updated their website and sends e-mails constantly, but they are pricing themselves right out of my price range. I don't care how promising anything in their catalog sounds--I am not going to pay $5.95 or $6.95 per packet to try a variety that is unproven to me. I try to order Brandy Boy and 4th of July every 3 or 4 years and then not order again until those two are used up. Then, if there is something at Burpee I want to try, I order it when I'm ordering those two tomato varieties. Dixondale did add two new short-day varieties that I'll try this year, but I noticed they didn't add any intermediate or long day types. Of course, they really don't add new ones at a very fast rate. SESE's latest newsletter said they're getting ready to ship the catalog in December. Well, I sure hope it is in early December. I usually get impatient and order online before the catalog gets here which also means the website isn't completely updated yet, and then there's always something in the catalog I wish I'd ordered. The Johnny's Selected Seeds catalog is a special favorite of mine too, as is Baker Creek. I can spend the whole winter looking through the catalogs from Johnny's, SESE and Baker Creek until I practically have them memorized. Forget coffee table books, I love these three coffee table catalogs. I try really hard to get all my seeds ordered and received before the end of the year. There's nothing worse than ordering in January with the expectation the seeds will arrive in a couple of weeks, and then having them back-ordered and not getting them until March or even later. If this drought hangs on, I will push hard to plant everything I can as early as I can in the hope that I can get a good harvest before the heat sets in, and without spending a fortune watering the garden. Last year, the early planting strategy worked incredibly well because we warmed up early, but I didn't plant everything early--only about half. I planted Waltham Butternut transplants from Wal-Mart in March, and was harvesting winter squash by the end of June. That's never happened before (and might never happen again). This year, I'm aiming to improve my harvest of all crops by planting everything as early as is humanly possible. You know, I'd plant the cool-season stuff tomorrow if I thought I could get away with it. : ) Actually, all of the fall cool-season crops are producing very well still which makes it hard for me to think about planting more in mid-winter, but we usually are hitting the teens intermittently for overnight lows by early to mid-December, so the cool-season crops won't keep going indefinitely. Well, except for the kale and chard. I don't know how cold it has to get to really hurt kale or Swiss chard because even when they have freeze damage, they bounce right back. I'm not sure I've had anything hurt them until we got down into the single digit temperatures, and even that only froze them to the ground and then they instantly regrew. I'm ready to sow seeds now, but it is too early. (Way too early!) Every day now I say to myself that I ought to dust off the light shelf, plug it all in and check the bulbs and replace any that seem weak, sterilize a couple of flats and start some seeds, but then I talk myself out of it. This week I noticed some very tiny volunteer tomato plants are growing in the cattle trough with the lettuce. I grew dwarf and cascading tomato varieties in that trough until October when I replaced them with lettuce, kale and chard. I suppose the leaves of the taller greens have protected the baby tomato plants from the frost and freezing temperatures. I think today I might dig up a few of those volunteers, pot them up and put them in the greenhouse if for no other reason than to see how long they last in there before they freeze. On most nights so far this fall the greenhouse is staying consistently 2 to 5 degrees warmer than the outside air. It will stay 5 degrees warmer as opposed to 2 degrees warmer if I had the doors and vents closed by 3 p.m. so the heat can buildup before sunset. If I don't close the vents and doors until just before sunset, it only stays a couple of degrees warmer than the outside air. I also think part of the reason for this is that the days are still pretty warm and the ground isn't real cold yet. I expect that sometime in December I'll see that the greenhouse is going exactly as low as the outside temperature at night. Dawn

Try this link Here is a link that might be useful: Composting

Yes, Early Blight ( A. solani) can be seedborne but as long as you process the seeds by fermentation, that removes most of the possible spores that are on the seed coat. And I say fermentation and no doubt someone will come along and suggest using one of the oxidative methods such as Oxiclean or Comet, bleach is not commonly used for a first treatment, but if you do a search here I think you'll find that there is no data for what is removed from the seed coat using the oxidative methods for tomato seeds. In any case, we do have the research of Dr. Helene Dillard who had grants from Campbells or Heinz, I can't remember which, that shows that fermentation is effective. Does it mean that ALL of the primarily fungal pathogens are removed, no it doesn't for that seldom happens but infection of plants is quantitative, so it lessens the probability that treated seeds will transmit disease. Of those bacterial and vial pathogens that have been checked, they are in the endosperm of the seed so no surface treatment can eliminate them. Carolyn