I'm going for a second crop too. This is my first year veggie gardening, and I had great success, so I'm hoping for the same. I grew Texas Wild (cherry tomato was not that great tasting to me), Yellow Pear (thought the fruit was disgusting until later in the summer), and HeatWave (which for some reason took almost 9 weeks to ripen--I learned how delicious fried green tomatoes are though). I ripped out the Texax Wild and Heatwave, and now I'm going to try Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, Zapotec, and Sweet 100. I'll see how it goes, this whole thing is an experiment to me!

I have seedlings started, a bit more than I need. (If you want some extras for your garden, let me know. I'm over in Long Beach.)

I'm starting Matt's Wild Cherry, Sungold, and Snow White. I chose three cherry types because, heck, it is getting late in the year and I wanted to be sure I got something for the effort. Next spring I'll do biggies again.

I started them around August 1st, and they're doing well in cells on my north-side back porch. My spring crop has mostly succumbed to what I THOUGHT was early blight but now think might be verticillium wilt.

I think they will be alright and you should get some tomatoes. I planted a small fall crop 10 days ago which consisted of one black plum, one carmello and one red currant. Up here in Nor Cal September and October weather is awesome. Good luck on your fall crop.

The crazy weather continues here into late August. Normally by now most everything is burned to a crisp except for the things that have had copious amounts of water. We had an almost unprecedented amount of rain over 2 + months which did drown out a few of my tomato plants and caused lots of yellow leaves on the rest of them.

Now that it has turned off hot and dry, with my soak hoses in place I am pleased with lots of on up toward the tops of the plants like on this Cherokee Purple and this .

I also practiced taking cuttings and rooting them which was successful with Big Beefsteak and which is doing quite well and has many tomatoes on it.

Since I did not feel that the Mr. Bruno from Australia got a fair chance due to too much water, I did save seed from the few that I did get, planted some to test germination, (which was excellent) and have planted a couple of to give them another chance this fall.

Right now, it looks like this may be a good year for a fall crop of tomatoes, if I can keep the stink bugs under control. I do not see nearly as many of them now that the ripe tomatoes are gone and there are no more ripe figs left on the fig tree, hopefully most of them have moved on or died off.
Bill P.

Just this morning I took cuttings from Cherokee Purple, Aunt Gerties Gold and Brandy Boy to root. Our first average frost date is November 17th, which does not give a lot of excess time, but there have been years when I have seen it go beyond Christmas or the first of the year without a hard frost or freezing. As crazy as the weather has been this year, who knows what will happen. There will not be much lost if they do not have time to make anything, so it will definitely be worth the gamble.
Bill P.