Dorothy, Yay! Congrats on the first tomatoes. That's alway such a nice part of the gardening season. It is one of my favorite days even if the earliest tomatoes aren't the best-tasting ones of the year. They still are the most eagerl awaited ones.

Carol, I hope the sunshine helps and I bet it will. Our rain has been just like yours---not necessarily a lot on most days, but just a constant drizzle day in and day out so that the plants are wet all the time, and sort of stalled because they have been growing under heavily clouded skies for so long.

We got some sunshine yesterday and a lot more today, and by tomorrow morning, our river should be back in its banks and the river flood warning should be gone.

I expect we're about to get hot now that the rainy pattern has ended and that all the green tomatoes in our garden that haven't wanted to color up the last couple of weeks suddenly will. Suddenly I'll be making salsa and wondering how all the green ones suddenly colored up.

Something I noticed this weekend is that the local stores, at least from Gainesville, TX, southward (I haven't been north to Ardmore lately), have just received fresh shipments of what I presume are supposed to be fall tomatoes. Young, pretty and fresh, a nice shade of green and with no diseases or pests visble on them. Seeing them in the stores makes me feel like summer is slipping away. How can it be time for fall tomatoes to be in the stores already? Of course I bought some, but only 2. I am capable of exercising restraint. Sometimes.

Dawn

Carol, I think you were the one who turned me on to Sungolds by sharing a few seeds several years ago. And George introduced me to Black Cherry. I only planted one Black Krim this year and a durn cutworm took it down. I put an early girl in its place. My cousin called me today and asked me if one of the tomato plants I gave him was supposed to have yellow cherry tomatoes. I said yes, and he said, "That is the sweetest tomato I have ever eaten." Another fan is born.

HaHa, converts everywhere. I love both Sungold and Black Cherry, but I don't have Black Cherry this year. I was out of seed and forgot to order that one. But a year without Sungold is like a year without sunshine at our house. LOL

Sungold produces a lot more tomatoes for me than Black Cherry does, but I normally grow BC also, because I like the taste. It is a little funny because for years I didn't even like cherry tomatoes, but now I have discovered several that I really like. It's all Dawn's fault, I think. I don't normally plant Tumbling Tom, but I wanted something that would 'spill-out' of containers and that is the one I picked. The one I bought is the yellow one which I haven't planted before so I am anxious to see if I like the taste because I like the idea of a small vine in a few places.

I try to plant Sungold in easily accessible places in the garden. Husband 'snacking stops', so nothing else gets trampled. LOL I have Tumbling Tom, Sungold, and Tess's Land Race, and I thought I had an Ildi, but if I do, I don't know where I planted it. I planted more paste tomatoes than normal, and more hybrids than normal because I need to have a salsa making marathon.

I have strange things happening this year and I'm sure it is a weather issue. My potatoes are beginning to yellow at the bottom and falling over and it appears that harvest time isn't too far away. Today I was looking at a tomato plant and saw these two small tomatoes on a branch on the ground. I leaned down to look at it and realized it was connected to the potato plant that had fallen over near the tomato cage. It looks much like this picture except there are only two of them

Potato Fruit.

I have spent the last couple of weeks working on a humanitarian sewing project called Days for Girls, (great Ted talk about it) and it has been eating into my gardening time. Hopefully this will be a major gardening week for me and I can tear out peas and things and get some melons and squash planted. I planted beans in 3 places and some were planted before a large rain and I thought they didn't germinate. Well they did, but not where they were planted. I have beans coming up in strange places and I am just leaving them. If they do nothing else, they will fix nitrogen near some of the other plants. The rattlesnake beans planted in a large container are blooming, but none of the in-ground pole beans are blooming yet. My pepper plants are too yellow and too small to be blooming, but that isn't stopping them. This week's heat and sunshine should go a long way to fix that problem.

I read that everyone is having a great onion year, but I am not expecting one. Mine have been very slow.

Dorothy, I do not know how there can possibly be one single person on this earth who does not adore the flavor of SunGold, and yet, I have read comments by people who say they don't like them. All I can think to myself when I read that sort of comment is that maybe they are harvesting them too early or whatever. How could anyone not love SunGold? I always put far too many SunGold plants in the ground, which seems like a good idea in the winter when I'm craving a fresh SunGold, and then it doesn't seem like such a good idea when they are heavily loaded with fruit and I have to pick them all. I think I have 5 SunGold plants in the garden this year.

Carol, You know, I will not necessarily eat tons of cherry tomatoes inside the house (unless that is all we have on a given day), though I do like them in salads. I do love to dehydrate them for winter too, and I can sit in winter and eat handfuls of dehydrated cherry tomatoes like they are grapes or raisins or whatever. For me, the real cherry tomato thing is all about being able to eat them outdoors all day while working in the garden. They are my form of garden Gatorade. I did not have many cherry tomato varieties on my Grow List this year, but when seed starting time rolled around, I started some seeds of a handful of cherry types that weren't on my list, so I do have more cherry types than I had planned on. I believe the ones I added at the last minute were Cherry Falls, Apricot Dreams and Balconi Yellow. Oh, and I do have Ildi but I actually might have had it on the Grow List. I can't remember. It hasn't produced a ripe tomato yet, but is getting close. The Cherry Falls and Apricot Dreams plants are in the ground, and the Balconi Yellow is planted in a row along the east side of a black tub in which I've been growing lettuce. That lettuce is bolting, so now I hope the tomato plants expand westward and fill in some of the space formerly occupied by the lettuce. I'm going to yank out the lettuce plants today.

I also try to put all the bite-sized tomato varieties in the most accessible parts of the garden, though that really only matters to me because Tim and Chris usually don't step foot in the garden unless they are coming in there to shoot a snake.

So far, I've been eating all the bite-sized tomatoes right out there in the garden, so as far as my family knows, the cherry tomatoes aren't producing ripe fruit yet. You'd think the guys would wise up and realize that since we're getting plenty of big tomatoes now, then surely we're getting cherry ones too, but apparently they don't. Eventually more SunGolds will ripen than I can eat in one day out in the garden, but with all the rainy weather we've had, it hasn't happened yet.

I have had lots of those little green potato fruit some years, and none in others. This year I only saw a handful of them. The weather has been all crazy and backwards, with early, early heat at ridiculous levels and now a couple of months of significantly cooler weather. I'm not used to having the heat first in spring, but it did make lots of stuff grow fast, so that then the later arrival of cooler, milder weather accompanied by copious amounts of rain could slow them all down and sort of cancel out the early rapid growth. Still, I'm grateful for what we have gotten from the garden even if the weather has driven me crazy. This is one of those years when every single thing I've grown (even cauliflower) has produced more produce at one time than I can handle and I've been perpetually behind on harvesting, cooking and eating stuff, and preserving it. The one thing I understand about gardening that never seems to change is that a really great year like this one has been so far normally is followed by a bad year, so I am already expecting trouble in 2017. I expect it will be the year that drought returns. After the mixed results from last year's rain-besieged, flooded garden, I am just relieved to have what feels like a more or less normal year, or at least the harvest part of it feels normal.

Oh, and you know it is a mild year when I can gleefully yank out bush bean plants heavily infested with spider mites and properly dispose of them because the pole beans are already producing a harvest. Often, pole beans here don't even get a chance to produce much before the heat shuts them down and then you have to baby the plants through all the heat and the pests to maybe get a harvest in fall. This year the pole bean plants already have hit the top of their trellises and are cascading back down to the ground, and I didn't even plant them until May because I was using them as succession crops to follow snap peas, brassicas and onions. The first pole beans I planted, which I think are Aunt Bea's, have produced enough beans for me to harvest today and cook for supper tonight. The lima beans that were planted the same day on half that trellis haven't bloomed yet, but likely they've been waiting for some sunlight and heat. My bush beans were near the southeast corner of the garden which is close to an open pasture (not our pasture) that's always heavily infested with spider mites, so maybe I shouldn't have put them there. Still, they produced a harvest for 6 or 7 weeks before I took out those plants due to the spider mite infestation. I'm now seeing spider mite damage on tomato plants, but that is par for the course here. I usually ignore it because most years the plants might show a lot of damage but they usually don't die, and then they reach a point in summer where it seems like the spider mite population has peaked and is falling and the plants recover somewhat. Now, if this turns out to be an epic spider mite year, I'll just yank out plants that get heavily infested to the point of no return. It has been a relatively pest-free year so far, but I can tell that spider mites and grasshoppers are going to be horrific this year.

My pepper plants are about as slow as they've ever been, and it seems likely that in order to make Annie's Salsa, I may have to run tomatoes through the mill and then freeze them in batches sized for salsa. That would allow me to wait for the peppers to catch up. Or, I can buy bell peppers now and use them in salsa-making as the tomatoes mature so I stay caught up on the salsa-making, but then that will leave me with tons of bell peppers (presumably) at the end of the summer. Or, maybe with all the cool and mild weather and excess rain, it might be a bad year for peppers. I've never had a bad pepper year, but there's a first time for everything.

Because of the constant rain and cool nights, I have planted very, very few melons and winter squash so far, but that changes today.

I hope you get to make it out to the garden, Carol, and enjoy it some before the real wicked summer heat sets in.

I've picked 3 or 4 4th of july, 4 umberto pear and this prize picked yesterday!

Cherokee Purple

I've got the first mess of greenbeans simmering on the stove right now!

Keith

Keith, that is gorgeous!

Yay, Keith, and yum, yum, yum! Congrats. I know y'all will enjoy every yummy bite.

I think my bunnies have found my Sungolds. I see several green ones one day and a couple of days later they are gone???? I might mention I scare the bunnies every night when I walk by my tomato plants on the way to feed the donkeys. The fight to get them first is on!!!!!!

I have two good size bellpeppers, waiting for them to get a little bigger.

Let's hope the bunnies don't get your bell peppers. Got blood meal? Sprinkle it on the ground around the SunGolds and peppers and it might scare the bunnies away. Or, it might not. Works sometimes, and not others. Possibly it works better in normal weather, and less well in drought when bunnies are really hungry and kinda desperate for food.

I haven't had a rabbit get into the garden this year as far as I know, but I've trained the rabbits (or, possibly, they have trained me). Every morning and every evening I put a little bit of henscratch in a pile about 10 feet from the garden fence. Bunnies come and devour it. Sometimes they are sitting in the general area waiting for me to bring them their food. As soon as I pour it on the ground and walk away, they hop right to it. They don't even nibble the plants that grow through the garden fence, like when pole beans climb the fence as a trellis. They just eat their hen scratch and possibly some grass or clover and move on.

Yes I do, I'll put some out and see what happens. Thanks!!

As stiff as I am, I think the bunnies would win the battle without an ace up my sleeve. Haha

I picked my first tomato today, but it was a little cherry from a Tumbling Tom planted in a container in my garden. I have a row of pots along the south side of our chicken run and was planing to plant things that would provide some shade, but I had so many tomato plants that I decided to use some of them out there along with some Rattlesnake Beans and some squash. I plan to weed eat the grass around the pots tomorrow so I walked out there to have a look at the area tonight. The beans are blooming and there is a sizable Better Boy tomato that is taking on that white look they get before breaking color. We had a hot, sunny day today and a lot of the garden plants looked wilted. Guess it went from cool to hot too quickly for them.

Dawn, we will both probably get tired of picking small tomatoes before the season ends, because I also planted more than I should have. I had finished planting everything and still had Sungold and Tess plants left. Well I hated to see them go to the compost pile, so I started sticking them here and there any where I could see something I could tie them to. Then I stopped watering the pots and was just letting the others go until one of my friends said she wanted the leftovers. I told her they were in sad shape, but she wanted them anyway. If I had known that she wanted them I would have given them to her when they looked nice, and before I took all of the extra small tomatoes out of the group.

I don't know a single gardener that can throw away a plant. I will break off a piece of plant and plant it up. It is crazy by summers end I have way to many plants to move inside and heaven forbid I should let them sit out side and freeze or throw them away. I think this fall I will have my own plant sale!, what do you think, no I wouldn't let any of them go. Haha

I am looking at my tomato plants in total horror. This happens every June. I look at all those big green fruit (and all the little tiny ones too!) starting to break color at a rapid rate now that the clouds are gone and we're sunny and hot and I ask myself "what were you thinking?". I am almost positive that I planted too many plants despite my efforts to avoid doing that this year. It is so hard not to plant them if you've got them. I have a couple of leftover plants that I threw onto the compost pile. I had nowhere to put them in the ground, didn't want to fill up another container with soilless mix and really didn't want to have to pick tomatoes from two more plants. Did those two plants die on the compost pile? Did a deer, rabbit or chicken eat them? Did they drown in the downpours? Did disease kill them? Spider Mites? Anything? Nope. They are growing. I've been throwing stuff on top of them hoping to bury them or kill them. The compost pile is mushy, mucky wet from all the rain, so there's still a chance they might die.

I love tomatoes, but too many is too many and I don't want to spend all day every day canning for the next two months. I'm burning out on the heavy canning load, so I want to get a big, quick harvest, can heavily for 2-4 weeks, and then stop. This is likely to involve pulling out a lot of plants when I'm done canning and keeping only a select handful of plants for fresh eating. I'll have to remove them when Tim is not home because he would try to stop me, though he would not succeed. (My reply to that, I think, would be to ask him if he wants to harvest and can all the excess tomatoes himself every night because after a certain point, I do not, and I'd rather be growing something else in that space that we will enjoy, like watermelons or winter squash.)

The harder I work to end up with less canning (especially less canning of tomatoes), the more my husband resists it. All I have to do is say I will be canning less this year because I'm burning out on it all and he comes home with new appliances, new accessories and new tools designed to make the canning experience easier. He means well but he is driving me insane. He also is buying me stuff I already have (!) because he has no idea what I do while canning since he is at work while I'm doing it. I already didn't have enough storage space in our relatively small galley style kitchen for all the canning equipment, and now I really don't have space for all the extra stuff he's buying, so it is stored in boxes in his weight room (which is Chris' bedroom from his teenage years). Maybe if he and Chris keep tripping over the boxes of canning stuff when they go up there to lift weights or run on the tradmill, he'll stop surprising me with canning-related equipment. I don't know what to do with him. Maybe I need to teach him how to can since he cannot accept that I want to cut back on all those canning hours in the kitchen. He is always so very supportive of my gardening and canning work, but he is not very accepting of the idea that I want to can less. We'll still have plenty for us, but he likes to give away hundreds of jars of tasty stuff to everyone he knows, and it is canning all those extra hundreds and hundreds of jars that is totally exhausting me every summer.

Carol, My pepper plants wilted on the first hot sunny day after the rainy spell ended, but then perked up and looked much better the second day. I expect your plants will do the same.

Congrats on the first tomato and I think you will have your first big ripe one soon.

I might get tired of picking small tomatoes, and if that happens, I can be pretty ruthless and yank out a lot of the plants. I used to think it was impossible to have too many tomatoes, but with just the two of us eating them (Chris rarely eats tomatoes), I find we have far too many every year. It is great when you're canning, freezing and dehydrating the excess, but once there's plenty preserved, I'd ready to stop with all the kitchen work. I'm no longer willing to just keep on canning and canning and canning until the harvest runs out, because that's just too much.

Yesterday I harvested Supersonics and Bella Rosas to go with a rapidly enlarging pile of tomatoes on the kitchen counter, so it is likely I'll start making salsa in a couple of days, just as soon as I catch up on canning pickles and onion relish and freezing all the excess green beans. And digging potatoes. And picking plums. It is that time of the year when too much of everything is ready all at once.

Dawn, all of the produce you are doing sounds wonderful, but that is only because mine isn't coming in yet. LOL I know the feeling of getting tired of canning and some days you just can't face another day of tomatoes. I haven't had that problem for a few years because we were gone a couple of summers and last year I didn't have a lot of excess, except for more Seminole pumpkin that we could use. I don't actually can plain tomatoes, but I make a lot of salsa, so it isn't just the tomatoes, it is all the other things that have to be cut up, like onions and peppers. Since my family has grown from 2 to 9, I suspect that most of mine will be eaten fresh this year. We have been eating the broccoli and cabbage as fast as it is ready, and that is OK with me.

It wasn't actually my peppers that looked wilted yesterday in the newly awakened sunshine, it was the big leafed stuff, like rhubarb and squash. The squash is in a large container, and I have rhubarb in 2 locations where they have a lot of afternoon shade, but they looked pretty sad. They look fine this morning though. I managed to keep rhubarb alive through one summer, then the heat of the next summer took it out. I was very selective where I planted it this time, but it still may get too hot.

I planted less of a lot of things this year, but more tomatoes than normal. I may be sorry for that decision. LOL I am not a big breakfast eater, so Al usually cooks his own breakfast while I grab a granola bar or piece of fruit. Other than that, he doesn't cook, but since he retired, he always helps me can. I think he likes the idea of the good food being in the house for the winter. It's a good thing because I usually do a lot of apples and they take time.

He was on the phone with a friend the other day and he turned around and asked me how many tomatoes I planted. My answer....."Who wants to know?" I was a little embarrassed to tell anyone because my garden is about half tomato plants. LOL

Carol, Mostly I'm just trying to rein in my husband who wants me to can enough produce to give to everyone he ever possibly might have known. He is out of control! I'm laughing as I say that, but next year I'm picking out my own birthday present and it will not be a new tomato press. Just saying! I appreciate his thoughtfulness (and his subtle manipulation to keep me making lots of salsa, lol) but I wouldn't have bought myself a slightly different version of something I already have. Honestly, the tomatoes are the easiest part of it all, so the press I already had was perfectly fine and I didn't need a new one, even if it is motorized.

I agree it isn't just the tomatoes. I could do plain canned tomatoes all day long. I probably could do them in my sleep. It is all the chopping and measuring of all the ingredients that go into salsa. I love making salsa in reasonable amounts, but the 40 or 50 jars I used to make annually has morphed over the last 4 or 5 years to about 250 jars, and it isn't me who's pushing that big increase. We all know who it is! That is just too many batches, especially considering it is just one of many things that I can every year. You know, I put my foot down last year and told him we were only giving salsa and stuff to his current work group of about 50-60 people and he didn't especially like it. He went along with it though, and he still tells me occasionally that this person or that person really hates that they aren't on our Christmas salsa list any more. Oh well, that's life. It is unfortunate I cannot supply his entire department with homemade/homecanned salsa, but one woman can only do so much. Maybe they can transfer to the SWAT division and work with him there and then they'll be back on the list. I tell him to feel free to give them the Annie's Salsa recipe so they can make it for themselves. I just cannot keep making it for everyone he's ever worked with in his 35-year career. It is just too much work in a short time frame and I do it all by myself.

My big-leafed stuff didn't wilt but my peppers did. It is funny how different our gardens behave! To be fair to the big-leafed stuff, all mine is at the west end of the garden and only had to deal with full sun until a little after noon, and then the bigleafed stuff gets dappled shade for the rest of the day. The rhubard is really happy in that location. I don't know if the squash will be happy and productive long term there, but it seems happy so far, and hasn't had a squash bug or SVB on it yet. Now that I said that, I'm going to walk out to the garden in a minute to pick cucumbers (cause, you know, a June day here isn't complete unless I'm in the kitchen making pickles or something else) and I'll probably find both squash bugs and SVBs on the squash plants just because I said there aren't any. My peppers are in full sun which will work as long as we don't get insanely hot in August.

I have seen one squash bug this year. It was on the exterior wall of the mudroom right beside the door, so I saw it when I was walking up to the door to go inside. The exact same thing happened last year. My question is why. Why is there a squash bug popping up on that same wall before I ever see one in the garden? Maybe it is overwintering there somewhere....in the nearby shrubs, perhaps. By it, I mean squash bugs in general, not that this year's bug is the same as last year's. That would be one very old squash bug. Maybe they pop up there to announce "We're here!" Well, now I am sure I will see one when I go out to the garden.

You know, I have no answer when people ask me how many tomato plants I planted because I didn't really keep track. I was aiming for 50-75 but based on the amount of raised bed space filled with them, I know that I planted more. My answer to the "how many" question is a snappy "too many". Maybe today I'll count them so I can answer the question. I fear it is near or above 100 plants and I was trying to keep it so much lower than that. However, this year I am going to be utterly ruthless and yank out sickly, low-performing plants as soon as I realize they are performing below my usual standards. There's going to be no sympthy for slackers this year. I don't have time and space to waste on plants that are slackers.

This is the worst year in ages for everything suddenly being ready at once. Corn harvest is approaching, if the coons don't get it, so I cannot afford to get behind on anything else because corn just won't wait.

You know, my front garden probably is half tomatoes if we go by the square footage devoted to them, but my friends would be doing an intervention if it was less than half tomato plants because they'd be afraid there's not going to be any salsa. A couple of our friends never got a garden planted this year due to extenuating circumstances like family illness and such, and I do want to be sure to try to have enough ripe tomatoes to give some to them.

One year I will take a year off from canning and see what it feels like to have a fun, relaxing summer instead of one filled with work, work, work.

Dawn

Tell OkieTim that I said he needs fewer friends. LOL

LOL. That is the problem, and he knows it. Every year as the holidays approach, I now ask him a very pointed question: how many people are in your current work group? I tell him I need to know so I know how many gift bags to put together. He knows I am trying to pin him down then and there to a specific number, so he tries to avoid answering. He starts counting, he begins to squirm, he stares off into space as if concentrating, etc. and then finally gives me the answer (which I more or less already know). If it is too high I say "since when has your group gotten that big?" The problem then is he starts saying "but I always give them to....blah...blah.... blah....too". That's the part I am having to work on because the blah, blah, blah ends up being 2/3s of his department. Would I love to be able to send nice little gift bags of canned goodies to everyone in his department? Sure, I would. If I had someone in the kitchen standing right beside me every day helping me can an astronomical amount of stuff. Since he isn't there beside me doing that, I get to decide when to stop canning. This is about year three of this battle, and it is a battle I'm starting to win. It isn't about winning for the sake of winning. It is about saving whatever is left of my sanity in the summertime. When people talk about summertime shows on TV, I just look at them with a blank stare on my face, because I don't get to watch TV in the summer because I'm always canning. When I am here on this forum on a summer morning, you know that I am canning and am waiting for a batch to come out of the canner. This is how almost each and every day goes in the summer. The items of the day for canning today are sweet onions relish, dill cucumber relish and sweet cucumber relish.

Dawn, Dawn, You need to start scheduling your most grueling canning marathons for the days that he is OFF WORK and put him to work. I never did can very much, preferring fruits and veggies frozen and pickling just a few things. And ever since Glenn retired he has taken a great deal of the work off me in the freezing dept by blanching on the gas burner on the grill. He helps with what little canning I do too, most of it pickling. And the only people we give anything to are immediate family members. You need your sanity. Keep fighting the battle.

Dorothy, I totally agree!

Ever since he went to the SWAT Team, unfortunately, he is like a child with a new toy and works 1 or 2 of his days off every week, so he's hardly ever home. Apparently being on the SWAT Team is more fun than he's ever had in his whole career, and I'm happy for him, but it means he is not at home canning. What I have noticed, surprisingly, is that he almost has a panic reaction to any talk of me canning less. That strikes me as funny. I probably could stop him from giving away all he home-canned food in our pantry just by totaling up how much we spend on jars per year, though a handful of his coworkers do return the empty jars to him, which I appreciate. Who knows? Maybe when he retires, he'll take over the canning. Well, I can dream, can't I?

You know, it is not necessarily typical that a guy who's been a cop for 35 years gets to have a new challenge this late in his career that he finds so interesting and all, so I'm happy for him. And, as a bonus, his SWAT and Special Operations (bomb dogs and such) team is so much smaller than his group when he was in Patrol/Rescue, so that means I can successfully cut back on the canning to give away, and he can go along with it a little bit more easily than if I had tried to cut back while he was in the same group he'd been in for 10 years or so. It isn't that I mind giving it away. I just mind that it makes me stay in the kitchen nonstop all summer long. I'd like for summer to be a little more lazy, restful and laid-back.

When he is home on whatever day off he actually is using as a day off, he has to mow 3 acres (so that I don't have to mow it!). That's important too because his grass clippings become my garden mulch.

I do freeze a lot. I only can simple BWB things like pickles, salsa, tomato sauce, relishes, jams, jellies, etc. Most other stuff gets frozen too, except for the few things I ferment. I've got two batches of sauerkraut fermenting right now and two different kinds of pickles. I guarantee you that none of the fermented things are walking out of this house in a jar. We're going to eat every yummy bite. And, of course, I dehydrate a little so we can have sundried tomatoes, but that is so easy I could do it in my sleep since it mostly involves just slicing stuff up and putting it in the dehydrator. That's so easy that a caveman could do it.

I'm so glad that Glenn is helping with all that food preservation and hope he is enjoying his retirement. Tim talks about retiring, but he is such a workaholic that I don't know if he'll ever do it. I suspect he'd get bored quick and go out and find a ful-time job. He just can't sit still for long.

I am fighting the battle a new way this week. While he's out of town on a SWAT trip, I'm canning all his favorites chow chows and relishes. He won't want to give those away! You know how it is with husbands. You just gotta know how to manage them.

I noticed today that more plums are ripening so soon will be making more plum jelly, and the peaches are just a few days behind them. I know that it surely is this busy every June and I just forget it from one year to the next.

Dawn

When I checked my Sungolds this morning one was covered in aphids!!! The ladybugs were all over it, we will see who wins.

then I saw aphids all over my milkweed here in the yard, 300 feet away. I am waiting for the good bugs to show up and eat the aphids. Aphids go away!!!

Tomato question. Are Brandywine and Rutgers later to set fruit? Every other variety has set at least some fruit on some of the plants.

Now then, I did damage the Brandwine by spraying with the soapy water, but they seems to be recovering. And the Brandywine has been attacked by aphids and whiteflies, I checked them this morning before leaving for work and the ladybugs have done a great job of cleaning them up. And the tomatilloes too.

But the Rutgers really has no excuse for being a slacker. They're sitting there in the garden with beautiful dark green leaves--not a spot on them. Not a bug on them. Not a fruit on them either.

Yes, Brandywine takes its own sweet time, but Rutgers only sometimes seems slow and other times does not. That's the whole issue with Brandywine in our climate---it starts setting fruit late and, often, by the time it finally is starting to set fruit, the heat that shuts down pollination/fertilization arrives.

Beautiful dark green leaves on a tomato plant in combination with no fruit often is an indication of too much nitrogen, but not always. Mine are a darker green earlier in the year, and lighter as the season goes on and they are fruiting heavily, but that largely is because all the energy at that point is going into setting and maturing fruit. I probably could keep the plants in better color if I'd feed them occasionally. I'm really bad about not side-dressing them as the season goes on.

Has either variety even bloomed yet? It is more likely to be too much nitrogen if they aren't forming flowers at all, and more likely to be either high heat (from the tomato plants' point of view) or high humidity if there are flowers but they aren't setting fruit. If you're getting flowers but not fruit, you can try thumping the flowers or shaking the cages gently to shake up the pollen. Tomato flowers pollinate themselves internally with no assistance from insects needed, but it helps to have a little air movement to shake up the pollen within the flowers. HIgh humidity can make the pollen sticky so it clumps together and doesn't move around enough within the flower to do its job.

When I grow Brandywine, I try to get them in the ground by mid-March because that gives them the best chance in my location of managing to set fruit before it gets too hot. I'll look at my pink Brandywines later today and see how heavily they are fruiting. I think they're doing pretty good, but I don't pay a lot of attention to them until it is time to harvest. My True Black Brandywines are on the pathway I walk down as I enter the garden and walk east, so I pass them numerous times daily and they are heavily loaded with fruit, but then they always produce fruit early here and they produce it often.

Being damaged might have set back the plants a bit as they had to divert energy to healing, but once they are putting out new growth to replace the damaged foliage, they ought to start blooming and setting fruit too.

Dawn

The Brandywine plants have lots of blooms. But...they were covered by aphids before I sprayed some of the foliage and blooms with the soapy water. Those parts of the plants burned, but new growth and blooms are coming along nicely. The past few days it's been whiteflies, but really, the ladybugs seem to be handling it. Maybe it's like you said, they are trying to heal before they can set fruit. I have been thumping the flowers a bit. The tomatilloes are in the same boat as the Brandywine. All of the above happened to them as well.

The Rutgers haven't been bothered by bugs yet. Maybe I saw a few blooms that haven't opened. I'll just be patient. My mouth is actually watering right now thinking about eating fresh tomatoes.

Pretty sure it's not too much nitrogen.

W

I've got some larger varieties, but only the champion tomatoes are anywhere near maturity. I'll take some photos of them later, they're big and beautiful.

I love Large Red Cherry plants. They load up with fruit and keep it coming. My fav for salads.

Amy,

Yes, this plant is absolutely loaded with fruit. Every day it seems I find a new truss growing on it. I think there has to be 15-20 trusses just on this plant alone. There are probably 30 tomatoes growing on this one already with a ton of blooms that haven't fruited yet. I think this may be part of the reason these guys are taking so long to ripen.