Sweet!!

It looks great, Betty!

We had a good green spring season here too. I think they really liked the hot days in March when it usually is quite cool because they grew really quickly then.

The lettuce did start bolting earlier than usual, but we have had lots of days in the 90s earlier than usual so that's not surprising.

I bet the malabar spinach will take off soon. It really does prefer the heat, which seems to be arriving right on schedule now.

Just for the record, although most of my greens have struggled through all of this bad weather and far too much rain, the chard looks fantastic. That's a tough one and is still holding up well. I plan to plant Malabar a little later but don't have any in the ground right now.

Swiss Chard is one of the strongest, most well-adapted plants I've ever grown. I like the appearance of the rainbow Swiss Chard blends so much that I've been known to plant them in flower beds. Even in our worst drought years when there's little rainfall, the Swiss Chard just keeps on growing and producing, even in 100 degree (or higher) heat.

I really like the bright lights chard too. I have one little clump that wintered over & came back. It made a big kind of tuberous root. Then I read it is a member of the beet family. didn't know that! Here's a picture of the root & how dense the new leaves are.

Beautiful!!! I love, love, love salads and always grow a bunch of lettuce & spinach. However much we tried, we could never bring ourselves to like chard, though. It's a gorgeous plant and I'd love an excuse to grow it but.... ew. We all hated it both raw and cooked. Maybe I'll try again in a couple of years.

Diane

Betty,

I have had Swiss chard overwinter occasionally, but not the last couple of years. I really have to watch where I put it because the deer love it too.

Diane,

It must be a taste bud thing. If you don't like it, why grow it and force the issue? lol

Or, plant it around the edge of the garden so that any critter than sneaks over, under or throw the fence will maybe focus on it and eat it.

One year, I had a row of the reddish castor bean plants (this was outside the fenced garden so no one would accidentally eat a deadly castor bean), with tall cannas in front of them, and a row of 'Bright Lights' chard in front of that, mixed in with an occasional4 o'clock. It was a beautiful tropical-looking bed that year, but I didn't harvest any of the chard in that bed---it was purely decorative.

Dawn

Tomatoes never set fruit during the hot summer, when temps are 92+ daytime and 72+ nightime,as per OSU fact sheets & extension garden experts. But, the plants are still alive and in September, after the summer heat is gone, then the tomato plants bloom, set fruit and it grows well even into November, occasionly. So why plant more tomatoes, when the spring planted vines will still produce?
Dale

Dale,

First of all, never say "never" in gardening, because there's an exception to every rule. : )

Tomatoes often do not set fruit once temperatures hit those levels, but other variables are at play as well. When the humidity is high at the same time the temperatures are "too high", fruit set is less likely. However, when the humidity is very low at the time those temps are high, you can get great fruitset. One year, during a drought, I set out 6 Big Boy and 6 Better Boy plants in mid-June for fall tomatoes. It was a drought year in which we received less than 19" of rain for the whole year, and had very low humdity---so low it was almost off the charts. In August, when the temperatures were over 105 and the RH was very low, those tomato plants set tons and tons of fruit. They set so many that I gave away brown paper grocery bags full of them. I was astonished. So, I started watching in other dry periods when temps were high and humidity low, and learned I could indeed get great fruit set from some varieties in those condtions, but not when temps and humidity both were high. Since then, I've seen other people here on GW say the same thing---that they get great fruit set from some varieties in high temps/low RH conditions. It doesn't happen with all varieties.

I generally get great fruitset throughout the summer, but my plants start bearing early, carry a heavy fruit load and wear themselves out by mid-July. It always amazes me that the same plants that are so drop-dead gorgeous, lush and carrying huge amounts of fruits in mid-June can go downhill so fast by mid-July.

Also, it can be hard to get tomato plants through the long hot summer in great shape if you aren't using any chemical pesticides or fungicides. I don't use either one of those and prefer to just start with fresh plants for fall than to resort to chemicals to keep them hanging on. Also, where I live, we're surrounded by thousands and thousands of acres of rangeland usually inhabited by millions of grasshoppers. As the pasture lands dry down and the ranchers do their haying, the hoppers migrate in hordes to any little green spot they can find that is full of green, tasty foliage. Last year, they arrived in June and completely stripped many of my tomato and all of my bean plants of all the foliage within a couple of weeks. So, in some situations, your odds of getting the plants to survive the summer and make it into autumn will fall somewhere between 'slim' and 'none'....and I haven't even mentioned the blister beetles who eat so aggressively that they make the grasshoppers look like wimps.

The hoppers always seem to go for the older, more tired and worn out tomato plants first before moving to the younger, healthier ones. By then, I've covered up the young plants with lightweight floating row cover to protect them from the hoppers. By the time the fall tomatoes are large enough that it is hard to keep them covered with row cover, the summer hopper population has peaked and is decreasing enough that I can safely uncover the plants.

I've grown fall tomatoes all sorts of ways, and I get the best fall production from new plants transplanted in late June. Often, the spring-planted tomato plants are just tired and have run out of energy and resilience, especially if August is its usual hot, miserable self. I've kept the same plants going all year, but the fall round of toamtoes is never as heavy or as high-quality as the spring round. I've taken cuttings from spring plants for fall tomatoes, which is alright, but it means I'm growing the same mid-season and late-season varieties in fall, when 'early' season varieties with shorter DTMs are more likely to set and ripen a good crop before the first fall frost. I've cut back the spring plants by 50% in late June or early July and they've regrown well and produced moderately well in fall, but not as well as they did in spring. And, I've raised new plants from seed sown in May, transplanted into the ground in early July, etc. and those always give me the best crop. I think it is because they are fresh plants.

There's a maximum number of weeks a tomato plant will give peak production. After that it tapers off. Many commercial greenhouse growers remove their plants once that happens and start with new ones to maximize production. Plants carried through the summer never give me nearly as much production in the fall months as those same exact plants gave in the spring/early summer months.

I guess it is a matter of whether you're going for peak production or just will be happy to get some fresh tomatoes. Since I can, freeze and dehydrate a lot, I want maximum production.

Also, the heat affects different varieties differently. Generally the larger the fruit, the more that variety is affected by the combination of high heat/high humidity. With smaller fruit, there is less of an effect to no effect at all. In my garden, the bite-sized tomatoes produce pretty much all summer long, although some of them slow down a little though not a lot like the big ones do. Some other tomatoes, like Porter, Little Lucky, Super Boy, and Jaune Flammee', which produce larger than bite-sized tomatoes but not particularly big tomatoes, produce just fine no matter the heat. Some of the varieties that produce very large tomatoes, like Brandywine Sudduth's, Stump of the World, Pink Ponderosa, Big Beefsteal. Giant Belgium, Tennessee Britches, Valena Pink, etc. only produce well for me if planted very early in the spring so they can set fruit before it gets too hot. In my garden, there's no point carrying them over the summer and into the fall because they start setting fruit so late that it seldom matures before the first autumn freeze.

Two of my early tomatoes this year were "Big Beefsteak". I bought 8-10" tall plants with main stalks about as big around as my little finger in mid-February, transplanted them into pots, and took them inside on cold nights. They were blooming and setting fruit in early to mid-March, and we were harvesting by late April. By mid-May, those container-grown Big Beefsteak plants had produced at least 15 or so 1 to 2-lb. fruits each, but they haven't had a new round of blooms since early May. Why? I'd guess it is the heat. So, the fruit on them now are all we're likely to get from them and once all those fruit or picked, I'll probably yank and compost the plants. There is little return for me in babying them through the summer in the hope they'll set fruit in the fall. In at least 50% of the recent autums, we've had our first hard freeze in October (despite what our 'average first fall frost' data says), and the really big fruit that Big Beefsteak sets won't break color before that frost about 50% of the time. It is more effective for me to have fresh, short-DTM plants that don't take forever to produce for fall plants.

Everybody has to try growing tomatoes different ways and figure out what grows in their 'typical' weather conditions because some people in this state have oodles of moisture and humidity even in the summer months, some have average moisture and humdity, and others have little moisture but also low RH most of the summer. I would imagine that what works best in each situation would vary.

Dawn