Such a Bad Year for Tomatoes

 By The Plant Lady

             I don't like to admit it, but I have had two absolutely terrible years growing tomatoes.
             The first one was not really my fault. Some critters discovered my plants, which were tucked nicely into Earth Boxes (earthbox.com), and took huge bites out of them before they even started to turn red. Every morning I would go out and find another one devoured. 
            I wasn't sure what it was exactly that was enjoying the fruit of my labor, but a friend, Rusty Hayes, who owns Runway Growers in Ft. Lauderdale, and who is a champion tomato grower at home and not about to put up with such nonsense, set traps. He caught a rat and an oppossum. Ugh. 
         

  I decided a big part of my problem must be a trellis I had my handyman build as a support. It was like a highway to heaven for the neighborhood critters, who apparently climbed up easily and sat comfortably while they munched.
     Not happy with going to so much trouble to feed these pesky undesireables, I pulled my tomatoes out early. Some time later, I came across this homemade recipe, from one of the growers at the Coral Springs Farmers market, for making tomatoes critter-proof. Although it does sound suspiciously like the largely unsuccessful concoctions used to keep iguanas away, it is worth a try.
          Take three haberno peppers, and chop them up in a food processor. Put them in a gallon of water, cut up some onions and add, boil it, cool it and then let it sit for a few days. Put it in your sprayer and coat the plants when the fruit starts to appear and once a week after that.   Hopefully your tomatoes won't taste like tacos. I never got a chance to try it, because the next year, I had shoulder surgery, and skipped growing tomatoes altogether.
          So we've gone two years without a homegrown tomato  and when this  October rolled around, I was raring to go. 
          I went over to a favorite nursery and got a Better Boy plant and a Beefsteak plant and some Sweet Million cherry tomatoes. I got fresh potting soil for my earth boxes, new organic tomato fertilizer and Dolomite lime to prevent blossom end rot.
          Instead of the disastrous trellis of two years before, I went back to a type of support I first saw at Mounts Botanical Garden of Palm Beach County when I attended a seminar on vegetable growing. My yard guy built a frame, consisting of two eight foot lengths of 2x4-inch posts pounded into the ground and spaced about the length of two earth boxes apart. They were connected by a single wooden rail across the top. The earthboxes were tucked inside the frame and as the tomatoes grew, I tied gardening twine to the overhead rail, and attached it to the vines with tomato clips, available through any gardening catalog. I was so eager to get a good crop, I even had my sprinklers diverted so the tomatoes would not be as susceptible to fungus, the curse of South Florida tomato growers, from the overhead watering.
           But then it started to rain. And it rained and rained, despite the fact this is our "dry season."  I think the water got inside the covers on my Earthboxes--you have to cut openings big enough to plant your tomatoes through the plastic covers--and the soil was continually damp, not to mention the leaves were always wet.   My tomatoes grew quickly, but just as quickly, the signs of browning on the lower leaves indicated that fungus had gotten a foothold. 
           To add insult to injury, the temperatures were still in the 80s at night--tomatoes need temps from 65 to 70 at night. As a result, the plants were stingy about setting blossoms.
           Here is probably where I made my biggest mistake. Instead of buying a copper-based fungicide that had to be mixed with water and applied with a sprayer at regular intervals to fight the steady spread of crunchy brown leaves, I bought a bottle of commercial organic fungicide for vegetables that screwed onto my hose. It was 100 percent ineffective. Since then, I have found copper fungicide in a hand-held spray bottle, but that too might be a lot of work for four large tomato plants.
           Before long, my vines were full of fungus, and by this time, the caterpillars and horn worms started showing up. Thanks to the weather and the skimpiness of my plants, it wasn't even worth getting out the Dipel (a dust) or Thuricide (a spray that needs to be mixed with water). These are BT products, which stands for  Bacillus thuringiensis, a naturally-occurring bacteria that makes caterpillars sick when they eat it.  It is considered one of the safest natural pesticides you can use. But--and here's the problem--you have to repeat it every time it rains. 
           For all my enthusiasm and labor, I only got a few bowls of cherry tomatoes, and that was it. Several avid tomato growing friends have reported only slightly better results. 
           However, I wasn't ready to give up quite that easily. After I removed the horrible skimpy brown plants, I replaced one of them with a new one, just in time for our marathon cold snaps. Tomatoes may like cooler temps at night, but not in the 40s and 50s, and the days were not ideal either: mostly grey and below the optimal 75 to 85 degree range. 
            Although some friends reported success with tomatoes planted in pots or boxes set in screened in porches, I have decided the weather was just not conducive to growing backyard tomatoes this year. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.