I have been offering periodic updates...

I started a bunch of plants (80ish) around mid February... I started them a bit early... but I made some amatuerish mistakes...

Some of my plants began to die off still in the cups... so I just bit the bullet and planted them directly in the ground to see how they fared...

I am happy to say that my plants (maybe 30 or so) survived two hard freezes, crazy winds, and all kinds of odd weather.

Just for good measure though I started a few more plants (which are doing even better because I avoided some of the mistakes from my first time...)

Anyway all those first go around plants are between chest and head high... and my entire garden is mulched about a foot deep with pine straw. The plants are absolutely LOADED with fruit (still green)... but I have managed to pluck a few cherry tomatoes for a few weeks already and snack on them (maybe a dozen or so)....

The problems I am having now though are two fold....

1. The plants are getting big... REALLY BIG and bushy...

Cane (bamboo) grows wild around where I live so I just chop it down and use that for stakes....but seriously the plants are growing to beat the band....I will have to get another entire truck load of bamboo pretty soon...

Will the plants taper off? I guess its a good problem to have but I am just wondering....

Next year I am going to have to come up with a new way to stake the plants... I was going to use cages... but when you have around 50 plants it gets expensive....

2. I found worms eating some of the green fruit... I found worms two days in a row.

Today what I did was got my 5lb bag of sevin dust and put some in an old baby powder shaker and doused some on the plants....

Will this be enough to take care of those worms? Do I need to do anything else?