As soon as I saw the word "broccoli" and realize it was you, I remembered last year and was hoping you weren't having a repeat this year. Sorry about the broccoli.

One thing I was wondering about was if it was possible that something could dig under or squeeze under the fence? Also, what size are the openings in the fence? I had to attach 1" chicken wire to the bottom two feet of my welded wire fencing (it has openings 3" tall by 2" wide) to keep the rabbits out. A small cottontail can squeeze through very small openings.

Last year, we raised our fence to 7' in height and it kept the deer out, but I'd still like to add 2' more feet to have even more of a "guarantee".

The small critters that cause me trouble are the voles but the cats control them fairly successfully. I do have trouble with crows pulling up corn as it sprouts, but have managed to stop that by mulching with hay, so that the green corn sprouts get "lost" in the hay (at least as far as the crows are concerned) as they sprout, and by the time the crows notice them, they are well-rooted enough that the crows cannot pull them up.

I keep squirrels away by putting a couple of piles of hen scratch, a little deer corn (small amounts only so the deer don't find them) and sunflower seeds immediately outside the garden fence. They eat the food I leave them outside the fence and I have never seen a squirrel in my garden although I have them all over the yard and in our 10 acres of woods.

Finally, with all early plantings, I put out a test planting first---about a week or ten days before the main planting. That way, if something eats the test planting, I have time to figure out what it is and how to deal with it before I plant the main crop.

With broccoli, since you have had two years in which the wild things have wiped out your crop, maybe next year you could plant under a floating row cover. I use floating row covers the first few weeks to keep squash bugs and squash vine borers off squash plants, for example. You could use them to protect your broccoli until it has been in the ground 3 to 4 weeks.

If you really want to know what is getting your broccoli, next year, use a floating row cover and, on the day you plant and after you have watered your new plants, scatter plain all-purpose flour on the ground around the plants. If anything steps in that flour trying to get to the plants, you should see footprints or some type of disturbance. This method has worked for me and helped me figure out if I was having trouble with possums, armadillos or skunks. : )

Sorry about the broccoli. And, hey, you are only 59 years young. You still have decades to plant broccoli and get a crop! Pick up some seeds now, start them in flats in late summer, put them in the ground a couple of months before the date of your average first autumn freeze, and you can have a great broccoli harvest this fall. I always have success with fall plantings of cool-season crops. In late summer when they are planted, there is so much more around for the wild critters to eat outside the garden that they don't even seem to notice the fall crops.

Dawn

Sorry about the broccoli, but it's not too late to buy started plants and get at least a few heads that way. Just be sure that you buy plants that have not been stunted or potbound or they may button. Human hair and blood meal are both effective at keeping the varmints from eating brocolli, and sweet peas, although you have to reapply after rain.

I've had a lot of trouble with rats or large field mice eating my radishes and lettuce, and initially with eating my peas. I did what you did and put out a lot more than I expected to make it for peas, which was the right thing. I'm sure I lost more than half the peas, though I have enough left that I should have a good crop anyway. Recently I've had the same thing happen with my sunflowers I tried to plant as seeds, except they were totally wiped out. So I'm starting another batch inside in 16 oz cups.

I haven't been able to whip the mice/rats yet, though I've caught a half dozen or so in traps. Instead I've started alternate batches of lettuce, spinach and radishes in containers on the back porch. It's very disheartening to see little stumps where just yesterday were sprouts.

I initially thought it had to be something bigger, but the total absence of tracks after I'd left it muddy around the raised beds disabused me of that notion. Also, the spots where the seeds were dug up were precise and very small. I don't have squirrels out where I am (new addition - I'm sure we'll have them in a few years as people get trees going). A few heavy-duty mousetraps confirmed the culprits.

I'm sorry to hear of your frustration. Best of luck in bringing the varmints to justice.

Thanks for the advice everyone. Dawn,
Iv'e thought of a fall crop but I always
start my own transplants and I am always
gone to Montana the last two weeks in
August. If I could find a few plants to
buy I would try brocolli and B. sprouts
both, but never can find any in fall. I wonder
though, how the hot weather we usually have in September would affect the transplants. While I have
your attention, Dawn, why do you only plant
heirloom tomatoes? I have tried a few but never
got many although I havn't had much better luck
with hybrids either. Pistol

Pistol,

I grow lots of heirloom tomatoes because every one of them has its own unique flavor. I like to compare the flavor of heirloom tomatoes to the flavor of wine--every tomato has its own unique flavor and taste just like every wine vintage has its own unique flavor and taste. With my eyes closed, I can tell if I am eating a Brandywine or Black Krim or Purple Cherokee or Nebraska Wedding.

I do grow lots of hybrids, and am growing more this year than I have in many years. My goal is to have lots of tomatoes, whether hybrid or heirloom, and my "requirements" for both are the same--they have to "taste good" or I won't grow them again.

One year, I planted a tomato called "Super Boy". I had high hopes for it, so I planted all 5 of the ones I raised from seed. Each plant got about 5 feet tall and was covered in tomatoes. I bet I got 200 small (2 to 4 oz.) fruits per plant. The plants reminded me of Bloody Butcher or Fourth of July, except the tomatoes barely tasted better than grocery store tomatoes. Talk about a total waste of garden space. If I wanted mediocre, mealy, tomatoes with grocery store flavor, I'd skip growing them myself and buy them at the store. Needless to say, I never planted Super Boy again.

If you are not getting tomatoes, your timing is probably off or you are fertilizing the plants with high nitrogen (and the nitrogen doesn't have to be very high to be too high for tomatoes).

Tomatoes self-pollinate, but heat makes the pollen "sticky" so that it will not move around inside the flower and do its job. When the flowers don't pollinate, the flowers fall off the plant, a phenomenon known as "blossom drop". I try (and this weather is making it almost impossible) to get my plants into the ground as early as I can without subjecting them to freezing weather so I'll get fruit set before the horrible heat shuts down fertilization, which usually happens here in Marietta in late June.

You have to understand the timing of the flowering cycle. Tomatoes are happiest in a perfect world where the daytime high temperature stays around 85 degrees and, as you know, we don't have a lot of that kind of weather. Tomatoes set fruit under these conditions: (a) nighttime temperatures are above 55 degrees and below approximately 72-75 degrees, while at the same time (b) daytime temperatures are lower than 92, although I've seen tomatoes form in daytime highs as warm as 95. In Oklahoma, we have a very short "window of opportunity" during which the nights are warm enough and the days are not too warm. So, the temps are a possibility.

Too much water and too much nitrogen fertilizer both can give you big, thick, lush, green plants that are huge monsters, look healthy and don't produce fruit. So, be sure you are not feeding them too much water or too much nitrogen. An inch of water a week is more than adequate in most conditions here (although I've never tried growing them in sandy soil and I can only assume they'd need more water in sand than they need in my well-amended clay) and, in an ideal world, you don't feed them very much of anything.

Let me explain about the feeding. I garden organically, so I add compost and manure to the soil every year, and let the soil feed the plants. I also put a handful of organic Tomato Tone plant food (4-7-10) in each hole at planting time and a handful of bone meal. That's all they get. No weekly or monthly feedings or anything else. No Miracle Grow sprayed every week or every other week. They grow just fine and produce tons of fruit. The Tomato Tone I am using is last year's formulation, and I understand that Espoma reformulated the Tomato Tone this year but I haven't seen the new one yet.

Think, too, about how a tomato plant works. The plants produce fruit for one purpose only--to produce seed to ensure the survival of their species. So, a plant that has a very pampered, cushy life with lots of water and lots of fertilizer doesn't feel "threatened". It has an easy life and has no reason to think it might die soon. So, a plant like that is not in a big hurry to make seeds to perpetuate the species. Give a plant a bit of a challenge, though, by keeping it ever-so-slightly underfed and ever-so-slightly underwatered and it thinks it might die "soon". Thus, it gets busy making fruit so it will be leaving behind seed to perpetuate itself. That, in an overly-simplistic explanation, is why overfed and overwatered plants often don't produce well, but you have to consider the temperatures too.

For what it is worth, the temperatures don't affect small tomatoes like the cherry, grape, pear, currant and plum-sized ones. They will produce all summer long and in great quantities. I plant tons of them, harvest them all season long, and dehydrate thousands of them every summer to put up for winter.

Some of the hybrids I am growing this year include Brandy Boy, Ramapo, Supersonic, Primetime, Moreton, Jet Star, Scarlet Red, Red Defender, Mountain Fresh Plus, Mountain Glory, Sweet Million and SunGold. If I could only plant one plant and it had to be a hybrid, I'd choose Brandy Boy. It is a heavy producer for me and the flavor, while not quite as excellent as Brandywine, is still very, very good. I do have more heirlooms than hybrids though.

A lot of people have trouble getting very large hybrid tomatoes to produce well here, so I don't recommend planting a lot of the hybrids that produce really large fruit. The larger the fruit, in general, the poorer the production. The larger fruited ones don't like our heat.

I've always gotten great production from Better Boy and Celebrity, both of which are easy to find in stores, but I prefer Bradley, Arkansas Traveler, Sioux and Rutgers to them because they all taste better and produce more heavily.

If your plants are flowering and you're seeing blossom drop in June (I never see it here in May), try thumping the blossoms to shake up the pollen. Or, if the plants are in cages, grasp each cage firmly and give it several firm shakes and that often will shake up that sticky pollen.

Once temperatures exceed 95 degrees though, the pollen is often sterile and no amount of shaking will make fruit set.

Hope this info helps. You know you can't start me talking about tomatoes, because then I can't stop. LOL

Dawn

Very interesting Dawn. I think my problem is mainly the heat plus I use 10-20-10. I have been planting winter peas and plan to try mulching with them. I can't use leaves because my garden is in poison ivy filled woods and is too far out in the country to do much hauling so I have to try to grow my own humus. One thing that might interest you. I have some tomato plants that are all cuttings (suckers) from other cuttings that are from a seed planted 3 years ago. They are Big Beef and are in my sunroom. They bloom and bear indoors like crazy. I am eating fresh ripe tomatoes now and have been for 4 weeks. Not a lot and they take forever to ripen but they sure are good. I'm going to set some plants outside this year and see how they do. I keep taking cuttings from each plant as soon as it gets suckers on it. They seem to bloom more with each generation. I will keep you fosted. Pistol

David,

I forgot to mention that sometimes you can trick your tomtoes into setting fruit later in the summer by shading them with shade cloth or by spraying them with water to cool off the flowers and their pollen.

Your perpetual cutting-grown Big Beef plants don't surprise me. Tomatoes are perennial in the areas they're native to and we just grow them as annuals because the cold freezes them here.

I don't grow tomato plants in the house because the cats think the containers are just one more litter box for them.

I do grow tomatoes in containers that I drag into the garage/barn in cold weather, and then drag them back outside during the nice weather. I transplanted the tomatoes to the containers in February and ate the first ripe tomatoes from them last week. Those few early tomatoes keep me happy until the in-the-ground plants start producing ripe maters, which is usually May for us, but may be later this year since we are planting later due to the repeated freezing nights and late frosts.

Dawn

Dawn, One last post on this thread. I knew that rooting tomato suckers would be old hat to most people on this thread. What amazes me is that you can root one in 1 week in a sunny window even if the sucker has flowers on it and in another week after being potted up, those same flowers might set fruit. Also the plants from these rooted suckers seem to flower more freely and set fruit more easily than seed grown plants. It takes soooo long for a tomato grown from seed to make it's first bloom. Since you are so good at growing tomatoes, I thought it might be interesting if you would like to do an experiment I could send you a Big Beef plant from my cuttings and you could plant it side by side with a Big Beef from wherever you get yours and tell us all if there is any difference. If you are interested, give me some address to ship it so you can pick it up and don't have to give your address online and as soon as I can root another one I will send you one. I am really curious about this.
Pistol

Pistol,

They bloom earlier and more freely because they are "older" or more mature. That is a common occurrence and is the reason many people start their fall tomatoes from cuttings from the spring tomatoes. I start my fall tomatoes from seed, for the most part, because I want to grow mostly different varieties in the fall.

When I start from cuttings, I've had the cutting form a flower and bloom while it is still sitting in water rooting. I usually pick off those earliest blooms to let the plants get some size and at least get into the ground.

Raising plants from cuttings is insanely easy. Sometimes, if I have a plant going down hill fast and it is not due to a systemic disease, I'll root a cutting off the freshest, newest part of the plant and, once it is rooted and ready to plant in the ground, I'll pull out the sickly looking plant and replace it with the rooted cutting that came from it.

Your experiment sounds interesting, but I'm not growing Big Beef myself this year, although I started some seedlings for a friend....and already gave all of them to him. I bet they are more than likely dead, too, because he always plants way too early even in a normal year, and this hasn't even been a normal year. I am not growing Beefmaster either. Maybe we can try the experiment some other time. I can't even plant all the tomatoes I raised from seed, although I'll keep squeezing one in here and one more in there until I get at least one of each variety in the ground somehow. I'm trying to grow fewer tomatoes and more of other veggies we like, and it is really making me cut back on how many tomatoes go into the ground.

This year I am trying several hybrids that are either new to me, or that I've grown maybe once before, including several of the Harris hybrids, including Primetime, Supersonic, Moreton and Jet Star. I'm aso growing several bred with the flavor gene like Scarlet Red, Red Defender, Mountain Fresh Plus and Mountain Glory. I've been wary of genetic engineering in tomatoes ever since Calgene's Flavr Saver bombed, but I couldn't resist these flavor gene tomatoes. It would be great to get outstanding flavor on a hybrid (not that I am convinced they'll taste great, but you never know). I'm growing Ramapo for the second year and it has been outstanding too. I'm also trying a lot of new heirlooms. In a way, it makes me nervous. I don't think I've ever dropped so many "faves" to make room for so many "new" ones in one year. I'm hoping the new ones don't disappoint and make me wish I hadn't dropped a lot of the usual "must haves".

Dawn