Re: heirloom tomatoes

My two bits of good advice are:

(1) just like with humans, plants need tiny quantities of many trace
minerals (other than the big N - P - K) to develop the vacarious
phytochemicals needed to ward off disease, insect, and stress-related
damage.  Make sure you nourish your plants with a good trace mineral source
(Sea fertilizers--- kelp, fish emulsions, etc. are often recommended.)

(2) never work around, pick fruit off of, or even TOUCH your tomato plants
when they're wet from dew or rain or your own irrigation efforts.  Touching
wet plants is the #1 way we well-intentioned gardeners spread diseases from
plant to plant.

I'm interested to hear what other gardeners have to say in response to your
question.  In the midst of a half-dozen kindsof hybrid tomatoes, I myself
also had a couple of heirlooms: Pink Brandywines and Reisentraub. The
Brandwines were the only tomatoes in the garden that got blossom-end rot,
even though I had given them the same calcium-magnesium fertilizer boost
that I gave everyone else, to try to ward off this problem; and the
Reisentraubs blossomed freely, fully, fabulously --- but didn't set much
fruit.  Anybody got a clue on that?

BTW, it has been all-in-all a pretty good year for tomatoes for me, but I
must mention that a no-name "volunteer" tomato did notably better than
anything else: so many fruits it crushed down a sturdy steel-wire tomato
cage and is now sprawling all over its neighbors.   'Course, Tennessee IS
the Volunteer State... ;-)

Julianne
Zone 6/7
Hot and steamy outside: ugh!
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