Hi! I'm so sorry, Jean001a, I haven't replied sooner but i have been away (got the neighbor to look after the garden :). Thank you for you response. I had used miracle grow organic all purpose plant food NPK: 7-6-7 when i transplanted the plants to their grow bags. (i don't know what it is made up of though). Luckily it seems as though they have recovered. the leaves are mostly green. However, i think that the fertilizer had too much nitrogen as the plants are now 1m tall and are only just starting to set their first trusses of flowers.

zornitzayoung, why not just plant a single plant and don't remove any suckers? There's no reason to prune except lack of space. If there's room for two plants, planted in the same hole, with one stalk each, then why not a single plant with 2, 3, or 4 stems? I should add that I was raised to prune to the main stem, but realized how severely that limited yield. Then again, I suppose there might be an advantage to 2 separate plants if the season is particularly short. The second plant would bear a week or two before the oldest sucker on a single plant would. You don't give a location or a USDA zone, so I can't tell if that might be the reason. === A few years back, due to family illness, I didn't start my own seeds. The plants I bought were from Bonnie, and many had suckers coming up through the planting mix (which didn't bother me -- and they were pretty determined suckers!). The Black Krim turned out to be two plants of different varieties. When I realized that, I gave them more water than the other tomatoes, but for whatever reason, toward the end of the summer, the BK died. I don't know how typical that is when two plants are started together and barely pruned. [The tomato that survived -- a dark pink egg that didn't match anything Bonnie was selling that year -- was one of the few highlights of a difficult year.]

natal pic gives you a good look at the color range they go through as the ripen - especially the bowl in the back on the right. Any hint of green or even the lighter colored gold ones need to ripen more. But indirectly yes, loss of leaves can affect flavor somewhat because of the increased sun exposure (and sun scald) it allows on the fruit. The higher internal temp it causes inside the fruit sort of 'cooks' the sugars changing the taste. Plus any plant that is stressed by disease has a compromised circulatory system and that too can affect flavor. Dave

I have a 'pot prize' tomato which has been doing really well until the past week where it has developed a yellow patch on its older leaves. I have been regularly fertilizing it with a liquid fertiliser and seaweed solution, it has new potting mix and the pot is draining fine so I'm wondering if this is a type of fungal infection? I had broad spider mites on a chili nearby too and am wondering if it could be that..