I'm sure others know more but sounds like overfertilizing to me. or are they crowded?

I'm wondering about crowding as well. 'several' bags of manure isn't very much, depending on the number and spacing of plants. Might be useful to know your garden size and location. I suppose you are in South Carolina.

I was actually thinking lack of fertilizer early on. I haven't used commercial cow manure, so other than nitrogen, I don't know what's in it. I generally add some all around fertilizer when I put plants in or after seedlings are up. The only problem I DID have with farm cow manure, was that my squash grew huge and overwhelmed everything around them.

Regarding dime sized buget, seeds are the way to go, and perhaps manure from moo-uch closer to the source although that requires a truck.

It may not be clear in magazine articles or books but the whole idea of raised beds is to improve drainage. By building up a deep bed of soil you solve the biggest problem of digging down into bad soil and creating a bowl for water to pool in and drown your plants.

There is nothing wrong with buying the cheap stuff - I do it too. The secret is to know what great garden soil looks and feels like. It should be made up of many sizes of bits and pieces of bark chips or rotted leaves and debris. The actual nutrients needed are tiny (think of the tiny amount of vitamins humans actually need to survive) but the soil has to have spaces in it to allow for air to get to the roots and to act like a sponge when it rains.

A strange thing happens when you master building good growing soil - suddenly you look at all sorts of debris as how it will compost down. You want coarse, fiber-y matter worked into your soil like chopped up leaves or shredded bark. A walk in the woods gets exciting because of all the stuff on the ground that you just know your garden soil would love to have worked into it.

Often the bagged soils sold cheaply are just too dense. They go for a very dark powdery look which is the exact opposite of what your plants want. They want to breathe MORE than they want to drink.

Cow poop is a great thing to add but you don't need much of it to improve the soil. A little goes a long way.

A simple way to improve soil is to work in the finely chopped or shredded pine bark often sold as soil conditioner or pine bark fines - it is often the cheapest stuff on the shelf.

Yellowing leaves sounds like rotting roots to me. I think you over watered and your soil is too dense, you need to lighten it up.

There is still enough summer to get a bumper crop of anything you want to grow.

REPLY & UPDATE!! Thanks so much for all your replies! I did read them and took them to heart, and put much into good practice. :-)

@ aisgecko- RE: ...are they crowded?~~ ans. Probably! But I hope that won't cause me any real issues.

@ chas045- RE: garden size and location= 4'x8'x8" and I'm located in the Sandhills of NC...near Fayetteville. The zone locator gave me zone 8 based on my zip code???

@ trianglejohn- VERY INFORMATIVE! I think the best thing I took from your reply was this: "They want to breathe MORE than they want to drink."

SO, here's what I did:

I decreased DRAMATICALLY the amount of watering I was doing...and it WORKED! Now, my poor little stunted-growth plants are FINALLY growing!! Less than 2 weeks later, I now have 3 baby tomatoes on the tomato plants, and all of my plants have doubled or tripled in size!!

But I do need more info. on this: "...your soil is too dense, you need to lighten it up." ~~ HOW do I "Lighten it up?"

Again, MANY THANKS!

How to lighten up - if you ever get to one of the big box retailers, look for a big bag of soil mix that says something about "for trees & shrubs". All the brands carry at least one and they are all pretty much the same. If any of the bags are ripped stick some fingers in there and check out the texture of the stuff. It is dark and crumbly with big enough chunks of bark (most likely pine bark) that you can see them. Some are as fine as sawdust while others can be as big as the last segment of your pinkie finger (assuming you have all your fingers). This is what you want your soil to look like.

If your plants are doing well I would leave things alone and wait til winter to add stuff and mix things up. Just by having growing plants in the mix, with all the roots growing around will stir things up and improve the texture of your soil.

If you ever see a bag of soil mix that looks like blacked fudge brownie batter or if it sticks together like playdough you want to either avoid it or mix in a lot of pine bark fines (the smallest screened bits of pine bark). Pine bark takes a long time to break down, so it is the best thing to mix into top soil to lighten it up.

Remember that some tomatoes slow down once the night time temps get high. What they really want is cool nights and hot days. When the nights stay above 70 or so the fruit just sits there and waits until cooler weather to ripen.

Here's another question: Should I mulch around all of my plants with straw, as I did with my tomatoes?

There is only a few flowering ornamentals that hate having mulch near their bases that I know of. Everything else likes the cooling effect that straw provides. Straw is mostly cellulose which is the primary food of earth worms and earth worms are natures rototillers so put down straw and let them do all the work tilling it into the soil.