Yes, What brother Dave said ;-) Although he didn't really address your 1st question... You wrote:Today I noticed the tops of them are eaten off! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! It must be deer correct? Will they be ok?" Well.... they might get an upset stomach (that was a lot of tomato plant tops), but they should be just fine, just to be sure though,why not go purchase a "salt lick block" for them.......nothing like a good salted tomato ;-)

In a word YES! All the brandywine tomatoes i have grown are indeterminate and will grow out the top until the frost kills it. You can prune the top knot out and that will stop it's progression and it will still develop the existing tomatoes. i live in Zone 4 and i have grown tomatoes 10' tall. if you have not pruned the suckers you will have to do this to each sucker. the plant will try to send out new sucker and you will have to prune them also. i prune all the sucker off my plants and i build a trellis 7 1/2' tall and string my plants and train them up the string. this gives me big beautiful tomatoes and they are much easier to harvest. also i prune tomato leaves up to 2'. this puts more energy in to the tomatoes and discourages disease and ground rot. WM

The only time I've seen them is during the day, but they're night-timers, hiding under foliage in the day. People say go out at night with a blacklight to search and destroy, but searching through 10 foot tomato plants at night was fruitless. What I do now is spray with BT every 2-3 weeks shortly after my seedlings established outside so they never get a chance grow into big caterpillars. Having to spray THIRTY tomato plants sounds daunting though. In the future, you might try planting some flowering herbs and plants to attract a parasitic wasp that lays their eggs into them, which kills them and the eggs pupate into more wasps to help you search and destroy. If you find a hornworm like in the linked pic, those white eggs are the wasp's pupae. Don't kill the hornworm -- move it to a plant you don't care for and in a few days, the wasps will hatch and go searching for more caterpillars. Good luck. Kevin Here is a link that might be useful: brachonid wasp pupae

Teresa, With the tall tomato plant, you can let the uppermost branches cascade back down outside the cage. If they begin to have a heavy fruitset on those 'cascading' branches, you'll need to use something to tie them to the cages as they grow downward or the heavy weight of the fruit can break the branches. Or, you can top your plant by cutting off any growth that extends much beyond the top of the cage. Topping the plants may lead to the formation of additional side branches and suckers, but it will eliminate the issue with cascading branches that might break. I have a Tess's Land Race Currant that is in an 8' tall cage and it already has climbed out of the top and has branches that are cascading back down. With this particular variety, cascading branches normally don't break because their fruit load is comparatively light. They have oodles of fruit, bu since the currant-sized fruit are so tiny, they don't produce enough weight to break a cascading branch. Did the squash literally go to the dogs....as in the dogs picked it and played with it? Or, was it too watery from all the rain so you gave it to the dogs because of poor flavor/texture? Our dogs think tomatoes and certain winter squash, pumpkins and gourds are just big "balls" for them to pick and play with, so I have to watch them if they are near/in my garden. For me, pole beans produce better in fall and bush beans produce well in spring/early to mid-summer or in fall. None of the beans I grow produce well during the hottest part of the summer though. I believe George has said some pole beans (maybe all?) are daylength-sensitive so that explains why healthy plants won't set pods sometimes. Your peppers may do better in the fall. Some years mine do well all summer and other years only in the fall. This year has been a great pepper year here so far--maybe our best summer ever. I think for it is has been a combination of luck and cool nights/rainfall at the right times in June and July. Usually it is too hot here for the sweet peppers to do very well until fall, but this year has been great. Hot peppers do well in the heat so they've been more consistent here, year in and year out. I haven't whipped my toms today.....but the winds last evening whipped them pretty well! The tomtato plants today, after a couple of days of rain and some cooler temps and some clouds for relief from the sun, look better than they have since early June. They look so good that I am going to find it hard to remove many of them to plant fall tomatoes once I fill up the fairly small space I had saved for fall tomatoes. For a year that started off rough, our veggie garden has been amazingly productive. I am hoping the fall plants (and the plants carried over from spring to fall) are as productive, and if the rains continue, I bet they will be. In May, with severely waterlogged soil that seemed like it never would dry, I was tempted to give up on the garden. I'm glad I didn't because it all worked out very well once the waterlogged soil dried up--not a perfect year, and not the absolute best year ever, but close! How odd is that? In May I would have said that the garden was doomed and wouldn't do anything at all this year and I would have been so wrong. Dawn