The pest I detest the most is the hornworm! They are creepy, blend in so well with the plants that finding them can be difficult, and they can decimate a plant in no time! My new technique for dealing with them? (got this one from somewhere on gardenweb).....cut the little booger in half with scissors!! Gross, but effective and better than having to touch them! (just make sure to label the scissors and don't use them for other things!)

Cuttings will actually root quite well using many different methods. (Although the cutting in water would do better with some aeration, either from an air or a water pump.) There are a lot of different hydroponic machines sold that will root cuttings, and they use several different methods, depending upon how much money you want to spend. In regard to medium, you could use vermiculite, perlite, hydroton clay pebbles, gravel, moist soil or compost, rockwool, coco coir, or the new white synthetic rockwool called 'sure to grow.' Heck, an old sock or some paper towels would work in theory, as long as you kept it moist. Or you could use no medium at all. You need an air pump, or a small water pump, or a big one, or a really big one for high-pressure aeroponics. Or you could use one of the new ultra sonic foggers. And then of course most of these variables can be mixed and matched. You can also play around with temperature, nutrient solution, hormone or not, and a lot of other little things. The biggest reason to not propagate from cuttings is the risk of spreading disease. Commercially, there is just too much risk to justify it, which is why you don't really see many cloned tomatoes. If you want to pay for an expensive cloning machine, you would do better with something like Japanese Maples, because they are so highly valuable. Trees that do not produce well from seed like the Japanese Maple are typically propagated from cuttings. Personally, grafting is what interests me the most right now. Next year, I think I want to graft everything to eggplant roots. Gardening is a journey for all of us, and I wish you the best in yours.

I can't comment generally on the results like antonaki who has grown it a long time, but I can share what happened to me. The plant is a very metered production plant in cool weather for me. By that I mean it started out relatively slowly and stout like a sailor, then like clockwork, flowered in cycles like it really wanted to take off. My problem is it got too cold, since I started it in mid-late August for reasonable growing conditions that ended this year in mid-November. For a variety famed for perfectly shaped tomatoes, you can see in my pic one of them was a double tomato, and on the plant there is one with lips, which supposedly is very rare to have deviations from globe. I would not consider this a large tomato, just a medium globe (5 - 6 oz tomatoes). Overall my yield won't be as productive as I expected, but I only have one poor plant to judge. Had it been warmer the plant really showed potential and that is evident now as it is the healthiest of all my plants after they endured two or three season ending freezes in the last couple of months. I love the flavor and texture though. Just a note that it is probably more juicy for some people's tastes and does have many seeds. The skin in humid conditions was not tough as I expected it to be a little leathered (result: not). It just has a great balance and most of all I like the aftertaste which is a clearly a bit sweet, maybe because I could leave it on the plant much longer than maybe I should. I think it is just a classically well-balanced tomato. I'm sorry you had bad luck. If you can slip in another plant to try again, I hope it works out well. This plant and fruit is very disease resistant for me and the tomatoes have a long hang time in part because of that. PC This post was edited by PupillaCharites on Fri, Jan 23, 15 at 15:11

Hi Dirty - It doesn't appear that Rapunzel is bred for resistance to disease. I am growing this variety for the first time in our GH this year. So far - no yellow leaves nor any disease symptoms YTD. The plant is impressive to date - take a look at this link. I will update throughout the season so you should be able to make a decision in part from how the plant performs for us - FYI http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/3685929/rapunzel-hybrid?n=15