If the fruit is red or even just breaking color on the Early Girl plant, you can pick them and let them finish coloring up and ripening inside.

Tomato plants die for many reasons, so it isn't surprising. They are vulnerable to all kinds of diseases, and even the ones like Early Girl that have some disease tolerance bred into them still can become diseased and die. Tolerance just means they have some degree of resistance to the labeled diseases, not that they're immune to them.

There are many kinds of Roma tomatoes and some bear larger fruit than others. If this is the exact same variety you've grown before and you had larger fruit in the past, then I'd chalk it up to hotter weather earlier in the year and to sporadic rainfall. Also, when tomato plants carry an exceptionally heavy load of fruit, the individual fruit often are smaller in size than when that same plant has just a handful of fruit on it.

If the color of your foliage is good and the fruits look healthy, there may not be anything your plant needs. We cannot tell since we cannot see the plant and since we haven't watched it grow over a period of time. If it seems sluggish, you can feed it the fertilizer of your choice, but take care not to overfeed.

I am a terribly neglectful tomato plant grower and increasingly in recent years I have taken a pretty hands-off approach to growing them once I have transplanted them into the well-prepared ground. I plant them, mulch them, cage and stake them and then forget them until there's fruit to harvest. Then, I look at the foliage, say "you look like crap, but I don't care, I'm harvesting tomatoes" and life goes on. I harvest for however long they bear, and can, freeze, dehydrate, eat them and give them away but I do not give the plants a lot of care once they're planted. I have a big garden and too little time. I've already decided I'm not watering after July 1st if we are in drought, so the tomato plants, which currently are very heavily loaded with fruit, better produce a lot in June because after July 1st, they'll be hot and thirsty and more neglected than they are now. Spider mites hit my plants hard in May last year, and are showing up at one end of the garden already this year. It is hard to fight spider mites in our rural location where the population is huge every year, so I mostly don't even try. It used to be the spider mites destroyed the plants in July, but they are showing up earlier and earlier every years. There's some things you just cannot fight and I refuse to let those things drive me crazy. I used to try to keep tomato plants going deeply into the summer, but in recent drought years I just plant some up close to the house that I do try to keep going, and then if I have to stop watering the big garden and abandon it, I still have the tomato plants in containers up by the house. If it wasn't raining this week, my garden might have croaked. It has been insanely dry and hot and windy. I'd sure like to have a cool, rainy spring and summer next year.

Bees are funny that way. Around here they seem to come and go. Some days I see oodles and other days I hardly see any. My farming/gardening neighbor, Fred, is about a mile away and says he never sees bees at his place and that we always have a lot at our place when he is visiting. Yet, his fruit and other insect-pollinated plants do get pollinated, so I think he has more bees than he realizes.

It is a great bean and squash year here, so much so that I am harvesting daily but still having a hard time staying caught up on the harvesting. Now that I'm through harvesting onions and early sweet corn, I can spend the next couple of days processing beans, squash and tomatoes.

I think we've expanded the garden to the point that I cannot add to it any more or I won't be able to take care of it. Once it gets as hot as it was today (98 degrees at our house, which is ridiculous for May), I am out in the garden by 6:30 a.m. most days and back inside between noon and 1 p.m. Sometimes I go back out in the evening after dinner. It takes all my time just to harvest, and I am finding it hard to find time to weed. On the other hand, life would be a lot less fun if I was spending all my time weeding and not harvesting anything.

It is raining here right now. Hallelujah! Maybe the ground will be soft enough that I can pull up the cornstalks tomorrow. I tried to pull them after I harvested the corn, but the ground was so rock-hard that I couldn't get a corn plant to budge.

So far, 2012 is a good year for most things, but the weather has been really challenging. I think the harvest of most things will be better this year than last year.

It sounds like you already have quite a large garden. I have just a few of each variety, and it all barely uses 1/3 of my yard. (City lot)

I have drawn out plans to add two more raised beds in the back next year and add a few things to the front also for this fall. I have to use raised beds in the back because I have pets. I am not comfortable using that soil, and they stay away from the raised beds.

I keep getting the message that I should "leave things alone".. I think I will just take a glass of iced cranberry juice out tonight and do just that. I will look for things that are ready to be picked and ignore everything else.

WOW! My corn is about as tall as my ten year old daughter. It isn't ready to harvest yet.

My kids are having a blast hunting for things to pick every day now! I am so glad that things are not all "done" at the same time. It makes it more like a scavenger hunt for the children.

I wonder if I can plant another tomato plant or two...

Brenda

Brenda,

You can plant another tomato plant or two but the chances that most tomatoes planted now will set fruit anytime soon are pretty slim. Except for with bite-sized tomatoes, high temperatures impede pollination and pretty much bring fruit set on tomato plants to a halt. Some tomato varieties will set fruit under slightly higher temperatures.

The temperatures that impede pollination vary a little--it isn't like the plants won't set fruit if the nighttime lows are 74 but will set fruit if the night time lows are 72--it is just a general range of temps. Generally, once daytime highs are hitting roughly 92 to 95 degrees consistently and nighttime lows are hitting roughly 72-75 consisently, you'll find many tomato varieties stop setting fruit until temps fall below those levels.

There are a few tomato varieties that set well even at higher temperatures. Included in this group are these: Arkansas Traveler, Traveler 76, Burgundy Traveler, Black Plum and the many heat set types like Sunmaster, Sun Leaper, Heat Wave, Phoenix, etc. Porter and Porter Improved always set at high temps for me but they are very small tomatoes--slightly bigger than cherries. Usually Jaune Flammee sets fruit well at high temps and so does Fourth of July, up to a point.

Many varieties that produce bite-sized tomatoes will set at higher temperatures than the varieties that produce very large tomatoes, and often some paste-type tomatoes set at high temps for much of the summer.

It isn't just the heat either, but also the humidity. In an exceptional drought year when the summer time humidity was in the single-digits many afternoon, I had great fruit set in August, during high temps of 107-112 and low temps in the 80s, from Big Boy and Better Boy. If we'd had high humidity with those high temps, the BB tomatoes wouldn't have set a single fruit. High humidity makes the pollen sticky so it doesn't move around inside the flower and fertilize. Sometimes you can get your tomatoes to continue setting fruit in higher heat and humidity by thumping the flowers to shake up that sticky pollen.

Last year, in temperatures that stayed over 90 for, I think, a hundred and something days, and over 100 for sixty or seventy-something days, SunGold, Matt's Wild Cherry and Jaune Flammee kept setting fruit all summer long, even after I stopped watering and when precious little rain was falling. Those specific varieties haven't done that for me in previous years that had high heat with high humidity.

Another one that normally sets fruit for me in the hottest July and August temperatures is Early Girl. So far this year our one Early Girl tomato plant has produced over 50 ripe tomatoes. I hope she survives the heat and the onslaught of pests and diseases and produces all summer long. If you could find a heat-setting type or another Early Girl to replace the one that died, it would be worth giving it a shot. You might get lucky and get fruit all summer from it.

When I plant tomatoes, I put all my best heat producing types in one bed separate from the larger planting of earlier producers. Then, if it is incredibly dry and I decide to stop spending money watering the whole garden, I can make the decision to continue irrigating that bed. My drip irrigation lines are set up in different zones with on/off valves so I can water different sections without watering the whole thing. That way I can cut off the water and let it die section by section if I choose.

Even the so-called heat-setting types like Heat Wave and Sun Master, or whatever they are called nowadays, only set fruit at slightly higher temps than standard tomatoes and I am not convinced they're worth growing. When you eat the fruit from them, it is clear that they were bred for heat setting and not necessarily for flavor. Still, they taste better than grocery store tomatoes.

I have a kitchen full of tomatoes and will spend today and tomorrow dehydrating some and canning others. Canning season has arrived early this year, but that's okay. I'm happy to have enough to can. Last year's heat impacted production very strongly so I didn't can or dehydrate much of anything at all, although I got some stuff put up in the freezer.

I deliberately overplanted everything heavily this year so that I'd have a good chance of getting a lot of food put up via freezing, dehydrating and canning before the heat brings a halt to production. So far that strategy is paying off.

Today is a good day to be inside processing food because it is very humid and sticky outside today. I have been putting off going out and picking squash today, but I need to get it done before those zucchinis reach baseball bat size.

Dawn