There isn't a question here just a strange year observation. I normally plant a few tomato plants very early and protect them with Wall-O-Waters. In the past I have found that this helps a little but that the later plants catch up and produce tomatoes almost as fast as the early tomatoes do. Really I only do this so that I can brag to everyone that I have my tomatoes planted in early March. Well this year I again planted early and it is interesting that the tomatoes on those plants have ripened very nicely but the tomatoes on the later plants are still green. The only thing I can attribute it to is that we had a couple of weeks of hot weather in June that the tomatoes on the early plants were able to develop enough to go ahead and ripen. It will be interesting to see what happens the rest of the year. The local weather reports are that it is supposed to get hot (mid to upper 90s) this week and weekend so we will see if that helps the late plants. Randy

I hated them last year and didn't see a difference...but this year after reading some on GW I put plants out a month earlier and cut the bottoms out of a 5 gallon bucket then the WOW over that,I noticed a big differnce.The plants survived a number of hard frosts and had buds on them before I even put the other plants in the garden.I took the WOW and buckets off when all danger of frost had pasted and the soil temp was at least 70@.Hope that helps.

Hi All, I love WOW. I live in Lafayette, Colorado, which is on the high plains near Boulder and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It can get way cold at night and way hot in the day - especially in the spring and fall - and then way hot in the day in the summer - especially now with climate change. Yep I've found that WOWs can fall over if you don't fill them evenly, but are fine if you do fill them evenly. (I've done both!) A guess about the variety of experiences described in this thread may have something to do with where the gardens are - could anyone who follows me identify their garden geography? The bucket idea as a prop sounds great - thanks! I've used/asked my honey husband to help and hold the WOWs while I fill them and that works great too. I use the kind that are pale green, and thanks to advice from another gardener, open the tops (and put a small stick in to keep the sides apart) to let air get in when it's warm or hot. It's June 13th and I'm just now taking them off my tomatoes and they look fabulous and huge compared to last year at this time without using them (I forgot last year). WOWs are great in the heat as well, since they keep the temperature even inside (holding the night cold during the day so it's temperate all the time). I just wish I could find WOWs that were taller so I could use them in the fall to extend the season when my tomatoes have gotten huge. I decided to take them off now because the tomato plants have grown so tall their tops are growing way above the WOWs. All good to you all in these times!

I don't use Wall of Water devices because our land slopes too much and when you try to fill up the WOWs, once they're about 1/3 of the way full, they fall over and roll downhill. However, if I did use them, I'd use Gordon Graham's method. For those of you unfamiliar with Gordon Graham, he is the gentleman from Edmond, OK, who holds the record for raising the world's largest tomato, a record he has held a long time. And, because I know someone will ask, it was the "Delicious" variety and it weighed 7 lbs. and 12 oz. He grew it in 1986. Mr. Graham once wrote a little booklet telling how to grow a giant tomato, and Marvin Meisner reprinted the booklet in his Giant Tomato book (which is a really great book, even if you are not trying to grow a giant tomato). In the booklet, he described how he used WOWs to get some plants off to a head start. He also said that even though WOWs were supposed to keep the tomato plants warm down to about 19 degrees, he'd had them keep tomato plants from freezing when temps went down to as low as 9 degrees, although for extra protection he had wrapped the tomato cage in Reemay floating row cover material to help keep the plants warm when temps dropped colder than that 19 degrees. As best as I can remember, Mr. Graham said he put together a teepee of three 1" x 1" stakes. (These used to be sold in bundles in nurseries as tomato stakes. I don't know if they still are.) The teepee was sized to fit just inside the center of the WOW so it would keep the WOW from collapsing or falling onto the plant. Then he put the WOW over the teepee and filled it. He left the teepee so the WOW wouldn't tip over in the wind. He then put the cage around the WOW/tomato plant. I would imagine it was not especially easy to remove the WOW when the weather warmed up and it was no longer needed, and I assume he had help or he had to remove the cage in order to remove the WOW. The other thing he did that I found interesting was that he would stack a second WOW on top of the first WOW once the plant was as tall as the first WOW. I don't know if he routinely did that with every plant, or if he is only referring to his then-worlld champion plant (a Sweet 100 plant that was 53.5 feet long) or the plant that grew the World Record tomato. Once the second WOW was filled, if snow or sleet was expected, he'd roll up a ball of Reemay frost blanket material and sort of stuff it into the top of the WOW to keep the precipitation from reaching the plant. (Remember, he'd already wrapped the tomato cage in Reemay.) He never mentioned in his booklet exactly when he put all his tomato plants in the ground, but with the World Record tomato one, he wanted to get an early start, so he put the tomato plant in the ground a full two months prior to his average frost date, so that would have been in February. In his booklet he even drew an illustration showing the two stacked WOWs inside a tomato cage. Hope this info helps. Dawn