I wish I could grow Brandywine as I love the flavour, but it is too late for here, and tends to rot before ripening. Instead, I usually grow Little Lucky which has BW as a parent. It's also on the late side, but tends to ripen a little earlier than BW because it's a smaller tomato. It's a bicolour with fantastic taste and actually fills in the gap when many of the varieties are taking a break in late summer.

Linda

On the stake a week ago and picked 9/23/2020.

I am pleasantly surprised at how smooth these tomatoes are. I was expecting significantly more ribbing and rough shaped fruits. Also there has been zero blossom end rot on these plants.

Wow, nice looking Brandywines, OldDutch. Looks like some great eating!

Those look beautiful!

They are pretty. When the friend I share my produce with requested Brandywine, I noticed that some strains were very late and many of them had odd shaped fruits. I got this seed from Fedco and these are very nice looking smooth tomatoes, and about the same ripening time as Delicious. This year Brandywine is way out-performing Delicious as well. They are also great eating, living up to their reputation.

OldDutch, what do you use as a stake?

I used to use a 6' 1x1 cedar/tredwood from the hardware store but they have proven too short once I get them pounded in far enough. This year I went with a 8 foot metal stake with a plastic dimpled cover. They cost a little more but they have worked out just fine. They cost $6-$7 each but last for years and have a dimple surface that allow one to tie cord securely to the wanted height when tying up the vines.

Interesting. I think I might have some of those kinds of stakes - only 6' though - that I bought for staking delphiniums.

For tomatoes I've always used metal cages with big openings - 6" or so - instead of staking. Years (decades) ago I made these out of steel concrete-reinforcing welded wire: very heavy and rigid stuff, it wasn't easy to either cut or bend, I had to use bolt cutters to get through them! And body weight to bend them. I have metal T-posts I pound in alongside those cages, on the side where storms come from, and use bailing twine to tie the cages to the stakes so they don't fall over in bad weather or when the plants get heavy.

I would guess, since you're staking, you're out there tying things up fairly often, and grooming the plants, taking out suckers etc? I wonder if you'd care to post a photo of how your staked tomatoes look? I've never really tried any such thing though I've heard about it. Is it somewhat labor intensive?

I have a hunch that staking and grooming my tomatoes might reduce the harvest: not necessarily a bad thing. ;-)

Joan

SQUIRRELS. Maybe they're chipmunks!!

I've commented on some other threads (hostas, I think it was) re "squirrels." Are you talking squirrels like red and gray, the common ones around here (no problem for me), or those notorious thieves and destructive varmints, chipmunks?!? Points of exclamation employed because dang it these guys, Eastern Chipmunks, *never* let me have any produce in my yard. No hanging pots even, of mini tomatoes or strawberries. They burrow into potted plants so as to eat their roots and do the same in generic underground burrows. I found an active burrow this spring under a PRIMO set of carefully curated large-flowered trilliums and yellow lady slippers, wildflowers I'm trying to re-establish in this region. I also found them undermining the concrete slab my garage is built on. The only place I can veg-garden is far away from my house, where the wide open sky makes it possible for birds of prey to make incursions chancy for the chipmunks.

In my yard I've had to make quite an effort re chipmunks. You never actually see them eating much, but they're doing it. I bought several live traps (through Amazon) and deported at least 3 dozen last summer, and at least 1 dozen this year. I know I have the perfect habitat: shrubbery, shady, water source. And when I grow small fruits in pots, juicy FOOD.

Plus, for water, even though I'm on a lake, they eat through my drip irrigation piping in order to get at the water, resulting in reduced efficiency of the watering system, and expensive damage that's actually rather hard to find.

The good news is that you can have in-yard produce. You just have to get out there and do the trapping. And keep at it. Gardeners provide the best possible habitats for chipmunks, we just have to keep after them. By the way, the best of all possible baits is peanut butter. :) Good luck!

P.S. OldDutch: Once upon a time a grey squirrel got into one of my live traps, and tore the bejeebers out of it. It injured itself getting out - there were bloody traces, poor thing - but it did escape, and I hope survived. Don't get the cheapest traps, not only because you'll lose your investment if you accidentally trap a larger squirrel that has the ability to destroy the trap, but because there's so much potential for unintended injury to animals that are not the problem. Look for something with a mesh no larger than 1/4", that appears to be of a fairly heavy gauge.

My main problem is the local gray squirrels (also an occasional black and an occasional albino). But this spring something started barking about dawn and I finally found it. I now have chipmunks too. This is the first year and the little buggers are cheeky hardly afraid at all. I live in the city; so the .22 of an inch solution is not an option. I have a neighbors a couple of houses up that hand feed the squirrels. I think they have named them all, too It is the squirrels that do the digging in my beds and flowers pots. I haven't heard the chipmunk barking now for a long time. We also have quite a population of free ranging cats; who also dig in my garden... Maybe one of them did me a service.

Feral cats are definitely a benefit for chipmunk control. But chipmunks are so fertile I can't imagine that a feral cat population would be able to keep up. Moreover, feral cats are a HUGE factor in the depredation of native songbirds. And hummingbirds. Any kind of bird. I'm totally anti-feral cats, unless they can be caught and neutered, in which case, let them live their lives (sob there will still be more bird deaths but it's better than killing them or letting them breed).

CHEEKY is exactly the attitude of chipmunks.

If I were you I'd start trapping now. If you get the finer-meshed live traps even a gray squirrel won't have the angle of attack required to bust through the trap and potentially hurt itself. But I'm not sure where you could take them. I have the relative luxury of being semi-rural, so there are a couple of spots where I can release them where I feel confident they'll have what they need to live. I don't know about your city environs. Maybe, in the city, the thing to do is look for big wide open lawns with only shrubs and trees, and places where it looks like nobody really worries about anything other than generic "landscaping"? Yeah, I guess that's what I'd do. Look for one of those super-manicured neighborhoods where there's not much around for them to damage.