BER - blossom end rot. I've lost 7 toms to the same thing. From what I've read it is due to irregular watering, or drought followed by heavy rain. I thought I was pretty good with watering but our recent heat wave has made it a challenge. Many of my plants are wilted by the time I get home from work but tend to perk up again after watering and getting some shade.

I am in Westchester County and many lawns are browning. This heat right now is very dry compared to the dense humidity not too long ago so we're not even getting much dew. Low mowing is also adding to the damage at many lawns around here. You probably need to water longer to keep the lawn green in July. Watering in early morning is better than in the full heat of the day of course. BTW, if you are not worried about appearance for a while then your current regime would probably be enough to stop complete death but possibly not stop dormancy.

Y'all are so silly. First of all, the Texas Pot Method is well-known to anyone like me who grew up in a gardening family in Texas. What's wrong with all y'all? Are y'all those "danged Yankees" my Pappaw and Mammaw warned me about? Secondly, it is a legitimate method used to deliver fertilizer and water to the root zone of tomato plants and it is always useful, but never more so than in drought years. Third, it was developed by Dr. Sam Cotner, who was for many years the head of horticultura at Texas A&M University and was widely used in Texas. I assume it still is. Fourth, if you have Dr. Cotner's book, "The Vegetable Book", the method is described for you on page 337 and 338. What? You want me to describe it for you. All righty then, here is it: Originally, as I learned it, you sank a clay flower pot into the ground in between two tomato plants and placed a layer of pelleted fertilizer in the bottom of the pot. The lip of the pot needs to extend an inch or two above the ground and your mulch so none of the soil or mulch wash into the pot. When it was time to feed or water the plant, you took your water hose and filled up the pot and then went down the row filling up each pot. Depending on the size of the pot you might fill it up two or three times. As the water seeps from the pot's drainage holes into the ground, some of the fertilizer dissolves in the water and washes into the ground with it. That's it. Easy as pie. Of course, clay pots aren't cheap, and if you're like me they're all full of soil-less mix and plants anyway, but any container would work.....milk jugs, two liter bottles, coffee cans, etc. When I was a kid, a neighbor of ours got the cafeteria ladies at the local elementary school to save him those #10 huge vegetable cans and he punched holes in the bottom of them and used them as his 'pots'. Now, from his book, his Dr. Cotner's method summarized in my words: Bury a planting pot, coffe can, etc. midway between every two plants in a row. Make sure the lip of the container is aboveground and that sufficient holes in the bottom exist so it drains well. As soon as your plants set their first fruit, put one level tablespoon of aluminum sulfate or 2/3 tablespoon of aluminum nitrate in each container and fill it with water. Allow the water to drain and fill it again. Do this until you know the soil is saturated (and you'll know this when the pot stops emptying out. Fertilize as described about once every 7 days on loose, sandy soil or every 10 days on heavier clay soil. What you're basically doing is nothing more than side-dressing, but instead of applying your fertilizer to the soil surface, you're applying it via the pot and placing the dissolved fertilizer in the water right into the root zone of the plants. That's Dr. Sam's method and I've actually never done it with either ammonium nitrate or sulfate. I have done it with the standard pelleted fertilizers you buy for vegetable gardens and I've done it with Tomato-Tone and other organic fertilizers. I only put the chemical fertilizers in the pot, if I am using them, at the timing he recommends. If using organics, I have compost, cow manure or Tomato Tone in the pot all the time, and I always water through the pot, so the plants are fed constantly by the organic fertilizers, which is OK since they are low N-P-K. If you have pets, small children, lots of wildlife, etc., you might want to put a "lid" on your pot. I like to use kitty litter buckets with the lid attached. I lift the lid of the buried bucket, fill it with water and close the lid. That keeps insects, bugs, field mice, small rabbits, etc. from drinking water that might contain some form of fertilizer (remember the last time you fill up the pots they will drain slowly because the soil has become saturated) or from falling into the pots. You also could put window screening or something else over the top of the pot....even a piece of plywood or a shingle or something similar. I bet this method is described online by someone at TAMU and I'll see if I can find it and link it. That way, y'all will know I'm not making up this whole Texas Pot Method thing. Now, all of you get your minds out of the gutters. You are GARDENERS, lol, and when I say pot you should think of a flower pot, not the illegal dope kind. Y'all sure made me laugh though. And, haven't we discussed the Texas Pot Method here before? I'm sure we have. Maybe y'all just weren't listening. : ) Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Brief Mention of the Texas Pot Method

I hope Susan is right and that El Nino will give us all some drought relief. Sometimes El Nino brings us a really wet summer....does anyone remember the summer of 2004? It wouldn't quit raining here at our house. Other times, though, El Nino peters out in April or May, so I guess we'll have to keep our fingers crossed. What worked for me in the summer of '06: Lots of mulching. Mulching early and often. Watering very early or very late in the day to minimize evaporation. Using soaker hoses and drip irrigation. Grouping plants together with similar needs, that is....put all your "thirstiest" plants in one bed and give them more water if they need it. Growing more stuff in containers. Water gardening is great, but I did have to keep adding water to the smallest pond so it wouldn't dry up completely. I moved all my water plants to that one pond and let the big ponds dry up. Planting mostly native plants and a few very well adapted non-native plants. One of the most important things I have done these last few years is to observe how all the native plants on our acreage react to the weather. I watch to see which ones are the hardiest, which ones come back even after going dormant and losing all their leaves. I try to learn from the native plants, and it guides me in making decisions about what to plant and what not to plant too. In the veggie garden, I always try to have plants in the ground as early as possible in the spring so they can produce before the hot weather and lack of rain kill them. I evaluate the veg. garden in mid-June and decide whether it is worth it financially to continue to water, or whether to turn off the hose and finish out the summer with 'dry-land' gardening. I do always put a few tomato plants and pepper plants in containers so I keep them going by watering them even if I let the rest of the veg garden go dry. I select varieties carefully. Vegetables that have been grown for many years in the southwest do better for me than many of the modern-day hybrids that guzzle water. The same is true of many flowers. And, I'm hoping for a grasshopper year this year EXACTLY like we had last year. It was our best year ever as we had hardly any grasshoppers at all. Our county had lots of grasshoppers, but they weren't at our house. I think the guineas had a lot to do with that. Also, I've put out semasphore every other year or so, so it is probably well established on our land and is doing its job in keeping the grasshopper population down. My poor guineas had to range far and wide to find the grasshoppers they wanted to eat. Luckily my neighbors are very tolerant and didn't mind having the guineas coming over to eat their ticks and grasshoppers. As far as I know, except for the vegetable garden which mostly died after I quit watering it in late June, I didn't lose many plants. I did lose some of the common big green elephant ears that were in dry shade. And I lost my banana shrub. Plants that survived the drought of 06: Native redbuds (I watered them once a month, just when they seemed about to die. I usually don't water them at all.) Native oaks, hackberries, pecans, willows, walnuts, hickories, ashes, some sumac, wild blackberries, wild grapes, trumpet vine and elms all survived (unirrigated). The native roughleaf dogwoods and persimmons suffered greatly and had lots of leaf scorching and lost some but not all leaves. They didn't die though. The wild plums that grow along all the fence lines here in southern Oklahoma all died, or at least went dormant. We're waiting to see if they green up in the spring. The Mexican plums handled the heat well. Native cottonwoods had a little dieback near the top of the crown, but were otherwise unscathed. Understory plants in the woods did better than prairie plants in the meadows in full sun. Guess the shade helped them. These included black cherries, American beautyberries, indian currants, redbuds, black haw viburnums, virginia creeper, greenbrier and poison ivy (in the shade they lived, in the sun they died), possom haw hollies, `and many others I can't identify. The river oats grasses went dormant exceptionally early. All the prairie grasses went dormant early and many wildflowers did the same. However, the native sunflowers hung in there all summer as did the milkweeds and a few other flowers like the greenthread daisies. Some of the plants we've planted in the yard around our house that did well: desert willow, chaste tree, four o'clocks, American cross vine, sweet autumn clematis, Burford hollies, southern wax myrtle, cannas, verbena bonariensis, purple wintercreeper, the low, spreading ground-cover type junipers and Madam Galens trumpet creepers. Most sumacs along the roadside went totally dormant (we thought they were dead) and then revived in the fall. Some Eastern Red Cedars turned brown and died but some didn't. As far as the ones that survived...they'll be dying soon as we continue to cut them down and remove them. With our large wooded area, this is an ongoing job. We had a small amount of rain at the end of July and then again at the end of August. This caused many of the wildflowers that normally bloom in spring/early summer to suddently sprout and bloom. Maybe they were there all along, but were dormant and so we hadn't noticed them. The fall bloomers like liatris amd goldenrod and helnium and the little fall asters started a little late but put on a great show. Of course, it doesn't take much water to keep them happy. The plants that surprised me the most? Eggplants and my sweet peppers and hot peppers. Long after I stopped watering the veg garden, they were flowering and fruiting and carrying on, business as usual, in spite of the drought. They were still fruiting when they froze in late November. Okra, sweet potatoes and back-eyed peas fared better than most of the other veggies. On the edge of the garden, the white-flowered daturas (aka jimsonweed) hung on through the heat. The devil's claw did not. The black-eyed susan vines got really sad looking after I stopped watering the veg. garden (they grow on the fence that surrounds it), but stayed alive and put on new leaves and new flowers in the fall after small amounts of rain began to fall. They were tougher than I expected them to be. Sadly, despite my best efforts, the bermuda grass DID NOT die. Hoping for a better year, courtesy of El Nino, in 2007. Dawn