Early girl cloched tomato looks whiney, but growing well. Not sure when the next batch will be planted out - possibly Saturday.

This week was unseasonably warm (70's, some 80's), and the outdoor tomatoes really took off! It's toasty inside those cloches when the weather's warm and bright.

All have buds, some probably about to open. Tomande seems to be in the lead, though it's far from the biggest plant. The aqua-cloched tomatoes upstairs get less light, and much less heat than the ones on the sun-baked blacktop driveway.

Hi, Hengis. The soda bottle ring would certainly help a bit, to cut the wind, and let off a bunch of heat when/if they freeze. Not as much of an enclosure, of course, to trap heat. Bottles of water inside an enclosure are good thermal masses for holding heat overnight. The cloches are supposed to protect plants down to 16° F (-9 C). Of course, that's against a cold night, not a long spell of those temperatures - brr. And they don't grow in the cold, they merely survive it.

I'm not sure what makes some tomato buds develop and others not in your case. For me, it's generally been the overall health and happiness of the plant. If the plant is growing stringy, it wants more light. A 6500K CFL light bulb can help - at the side instead of more on top.

The tomatoes got a few little patches of frostbite this week on leaves touching their cloches, but seem vigorously happy for all that. One, the tomande, has a flower open, but it opened before the frost, so don't have much hope of that amounting to anything. Buds are developing on all of them.

The plants for my parents are overdue for transplanting out, and blooming, but they aren't getting cloches where they're going, so they had to wait.

Mom's tomatoes set first fruit, so those will be earliest to harvest (they're sungold cherries). Dad's plants are in the ground as of Tuesday, and both were flowering (supertasty and early girl). All mine are now flowering. Got taller very fast with the heat the past couple days, and hammered badly by a thunderstorm last night. Time to cage & stake 'em.

Even hotter and even happier this week. I think there's fruit set on all tomatoes, but only the downstairs ones have a few plumped up to large blueberry size.

Aphids have arrived... Picked some off by hand, but mostly seeing how the natural predators make out. Only the early girl had more than a few aphids, and maybe only on a couple branches.

The downstairs crops got a dose of seaweed fertilizer this week. All love that stuff. Not full strength - just added some normal strength to their reservoirs, so very dilute. Tomato plants don't need much more encouragement...

Hi, Beth -

I saw on GardenWeb you asked about slightly purpling tiny-freckled tomato leaves, and people suggested you use some boron-yielding eyewash on them. Did you try this? Did it help?

My razzleberry has this slight purpling, and leaf roll. The plant still seems to be metabolically thriving - more growth, new flowers, fruit setting and growing. Not that big, but it's determinate. It drinks its entire reservoir in less than a day.

Anyway, I'm trying to decide whether to try the boron eyewash trick. Another option is that I bought extra GrowBox nutrient-mulch kits. I could break open one of them and use maybe 1/4 of the nutes as a top-side dressing on the razzleberry pot, and use some on other pots as well. The growbox tomatoes never do leaf curl or purple spots - they look gorgeous at this point. (They often do BER. But the previous summers have all had torrential rain and wind problems.)

What do you think?

I hope your tomatoes are doing well! Close to harvesting first ones down there? I'm still not sure which of these will ripen first.

Well, I decided to try the growbox nutes instead of the eye solution - but lightly. The amount used in a growbox for one tomato plant (half a nutrient/mulch patch), I split between 10 plants. Maybe a tablespoon each. Not a dramatic turnaround on any of the plants, but the razzleberry does seem to be slightly less purple-leafed.

All plants growing like mad, far too many tomatoes. Most of the growbox plants have already way outgrown their supports, and it's only June. They will need to be pruned down for size, that's for sure. Aphids are infesting the growbox on the driveway. So far no drastic measures - just hosing them. Which isn't very effective. But I'm hoping the insect predators will work harder. The brandy boy tomato had the season's first BER casualty. Hopefully the bucks county will do less of that this year.

Thanks, Beth - good to know, re the phosphorus. Strange - the symptoms look related to the wrong-color-light issues indoors. But of all my tomato plants, that one gets more than enough sun.

We're in the middle of an 80's stretch here again this week. On the shoreline. I'm sure it's much hotter inland. Definitely hot for June!

All plants healthy, no BER losses! But, no ripening either. Oh, well. It's still very early for CT.

Hi, Beth,

Wow that's fast on your tomatoes ripening! Congratulations on having tomatoes! Do you think all your tomatoes ripen as fast as the early ones, or just the Cherokee Purple? I'd be surprised if my early girl ripened first this year, just by size of fruit. And I don't like its tomatoes as well as others. But I was impressed last year by its resilience to a lousy cold short rainy summer with epidemic fungus. Seemed like a good hedge bet.

I guess mine set about a week later than yours. But of course aside from today, it is cooler here. Oy, it's risen to 99°F as I've been typing, and it's just now solar noon - not yet the hottest part of the day. But I'm not sure I've ever seen temps 100 or above in shoreline CT. How high can it go, I wonder? It's already 5 degrees above the forecast. The Sound is already warm, but it still must be moderating the temperature today like any other day?

I'm glad you also report the first-tomatoes-aren't-great effect. Last year I almost cut down and tossed the early girl after tasting the first one, and debated it for the first 5 or so of my indoor-start jet star this year. Patience...is a virtue... with tomatoes... I can make it a mantra all I want, but patience still isn't my strong suit.

And today the first two tomandes started reddening. Counting the BER brandy boy as ripening, if not eating, the last holdout is the bucks county tomato, whose tomatoes are actually biggest, regardless of the sales copy. The other 4 plants all started ripening within a few days, 5-6 weeks from setting fruit.