I can't seem tom find Super Bloom locally, but I haven't tried places like Ace, Sutherlands,or any of the garden stores. Wal-Mart, KMart, Lowes and Home Depot don't seem to carry it. I'll grab something else if that's what I need to do.

TulsaCowboy,
My local Lowes had the Green Light Super Bloom water soluble plant food. The Home Depot didn't carry it.
MiaOKC,
headed to the garden with super Bloom and spray bottle in hand; look out.

:) @nated. Race you there!
@Tulsacowboy, I'm pretty sure I got mine at Lowes, it is the same brand as nated's.

If you cannot find Super Bloom, the bloom booster version of Miravle Grow works almost as well.

Often, at the two Lowe's stores within the closest driving distance for us, the Bloom Booster is out in the outside portion of the garden center positioned close to whatever flowering plants they still have at this time of the year. If I don't find it with the rest of the water soluble fertilizers, I look over by the flowers.

I fed my tomato plants yesterday. We have plenty of tomatoes to pick now (it's canning time!) but any fruit that sets during the cool spell will ensure the harvest continues into late July and early August.

Mia, thank you for giving everyone the head's up. I meant to do it last night but was so tired after working in the garden all day that I couldn't think, much less type. I don't know that we will get as cool down here as y'all will up there but I hope we do

Dawn

*runs to the garden with bottle in hand*

*running to lowes, then to garden*

Thank you for the advance notice!! I just squealed with talk of more tomatoes!! :)

It's supposed to be close to 100 for the next couple of days. Can I still spray the 'maters?

I got all excited when I read this post and then I checked my forecast. My "cold front" isn't very exciting. Our high Friday is supposed to be 111, so I guess I should be happy about the temperature staying in the two-digit range. The lows in the 60's are a really nice change, though.

Leslie

My local Lowe's was completely sold out of it :( I grabbed some MG 5-15-5 and hand watered all my blooming veggies. I plan to hit up Southwoods and/or Sutherlands to check them at lunch time. Failing that, I'll hit up every Lowe's in town!

Would anything with phosphate work?

Ezirah, You must be like me and keep the bloom booster ready in the shed just for such special occasions.

Luvabasil, Yes. It takes the fertilizer a few days to stimulate blooms so spraying now is better than waiting another couple of days.

Leslie, Lordy, lordy, that's hot! Anything that happens will be an improvement even if y'all only go to 105, but you might not get the same cool-spell fruit-set the rest of us are aiming for. How's your garden doing right now?

Helen, Yes. To push the plants into being in bloom during the cool spell so we can get a bit of fruit to set, anything high in P will help. I like Super Bloom because it 12-55-6. The Miracle Grow Bloom Booster is 10-52-10 so it isn't that different and likely works just as well. Any Triple Phosphate or Super Triple Phosphate product like Bonide's likely would work just fine. I think Bonide's is 0-45-0.

Dawn

Mine says 15-30-15. Will it work or do I need to run to the store. I need to get a spray bottle anyway.

I bought a canister of Super Bloom earlier this month after going back and reading an old post about it. The whole month of May was so rainy and so cloudy that I suspected it affected the fruit set on my tomatoes and I didn't want to risk getting no more fruit set before the insane heat sets in. I last fed my tomatoes about 10 days ago.

Then I saw last night the news forecast of 86 for sun-tues and then soon after read this post; so my first task this morning was to fertilize with Super Bloom.

I am wondering how exactly do you guys apply it since I've seen the use of a spray bottle mentioned. I've just been adding a scoop to my 1 gallon watering can then try to get it on most of the leaves then some around the roots. How many plants do you water with one scoop of fertilizer?

My garden is actually doing really well considering we've already had 39 days over 90 degrees and 11 days over 100 this year. Planting my tomatoes when I did really helped them. It was a pain to cover them, but I had the best fruit set I've ever had this year. San Marzano Redorta hasn't set a single fruit, but the plant looks great. I don't know what it's problem is because it's right next to the others.

Most of the things I planted a little later than I would've liked are producing well. Beans and cucumbers aren't really doing anything, but the okra and squash have gone crazy. The only disappointment so far are the southern peas. They should be fine with the heat, but they're not really growing at all. Oh, and I'm disappointed in the cantaloupe, which I never got around to planting. I can't believe it didn't just grow anyway.

Leslie

I'm asking the same thing Cynthiann is wondering, how do you apply Super Bloom ?

I found plenty at Lowes on South I-240 and Santa Fe. But I'm not sure the best way to apply.

Erod,

I think it will be fine.The key is that you're using the P in the fertilizer to kick up the plants' ability to form flowers so that hopefully they will be flowering when the cooler temperatures arrive, and this will increase the chance of getting some fruit to set during a part of the summer when the daytime high temps and nighttime low temps often are so high for weeks on end that the flowers fall off the plants without pollination and fertilization occurring. I started playing around with this technique in a very hot summer when fruit set got shut down very early, and found it worked pretty well. Of course, some years (2011 was one of them) we never even get a cool front in summer that gives us a chance at getting summertime fruit set, but this year at least some of us are. I don't think Leslie will get cool enough weather over there in southwestern OK. Once they get hot over there (long before the rest of us do), they just don't cool down.

Cynthiann & LCDollar, Usually it says on the package label how much to give a plant. Or, it used to. I haven't actually read the label in a long time. I think you are supposed to give one young plant about a cup of the mixture from the watering can, but it would depend on the size of the plant. Obviously a plant that was 6' tall would need more fertilizer than a plant that is 1' tall. For a large plant, I'd give it 4 cups of the mixture from the watering cal if I was using a watering can. What I do is water the ground so it is nice and moist first. Then I come back with the fertilizer in the hose-end sprayer and feed all the plants. Starting out with moist soil helps ensure the water-soluble fertilizer will travel down to the plants' root zone. I think the recommendation at one time on the Miracle Grow bloom booster said to use a 1-gallon watering can full of the diluted water/fertilizer mix for every 10 square feet of garden space. While you want to give each plant enough fertilizer to help it, you don't want to give it so much that you burn the roots. Just apply what seems reasonable.

Leslie, We are slackers over here. Of course, our temperatures always seem to be higher than those at the Burneyville mesonet station, so it shows we have exceeded 90 degrees 17 times this year and 100 not at all, but at our house, I think we have exceeded 90 degrees about 25 times, and we hit 100 degrees today. Regardless, we are practically in winter compared to yall.

I'm glad to hear that you have had the best ever fruit set this year. That is terrific. Sometimes SMR is just that way. If y'all stay hot, you might want to shade it some to see if i will eventually get in the mood to set fruit. I have had it set fruit at really high temperatures some years. It doesn't seem to be as affected by high temperatures as some others. I have shaded individual plants before just by clipping newspaper to the top of the cage, like a little sunshade right over the plants' head.

I don't understand why your cucumbers aren't doing anything, but I have the same problem some years in that they seem slower to start producing than I think they should be. I don't know that I've ever seen heat really and truly shut them down, but then the heat we have here is normally not as bad as yours, so maybe we stay just cool enough. My pole beans just started flowering a couple of days ago, so their timing is pretty good with a cool front coming. My pole type southern peas are climbing the fence vigorously and are about 3' tall but haven't bloomed yet. The southern peas I planted a few days as a succession crop in the beds where the potatoes had been are very happy. They started sprouting less than 48 hours after I planted them. They sure do like the heat, so I don't know why yours are being lazy. : ) Maybe you need to whack the plants with a stick or something. Oh, no, wait, that's the tomato cages that get whacked with a stick to stir up sticky pollen, not southern peas.

Now, the cantaloupe.....that's what we call magical thinking at our house.....expecting it to grow even though we never planted it. It isn't too late. If you sowed seed now, you'd be eating cantaloupe in September, if not earlier.

You have too much heat, perhaps, but I didn't think it was possible to really have too much heat for southern peas. Maybe if you look at NATIVE Seed/Search you could find seed from one of the desert tribes that has a climate similar to yours. It would take some research, though, because the seeds they sell for people in higher elevations likely wouldn't like your kind of heat either. You need the desert varieties.

LCDollar, If I only had a handful of plants, I'd use a watering can, but those of us with a large number of plants tend to use hose-end sprayers that allow us to cover a large amount of ground easily and quickly. I have a Miracle Grow hose-end sprayer and I use it no matter what variety of water soluble plant food I am using. Since we don't get a chance to 'boost' our chance of getting tomato fruit set very often in the extreme summer heat, this technique gives us a chance to maybe get some more fruit to set on the plants in addition to whatever managed to set before the temperatures got hot enough to impede fruitset. Those temperatures, by the way, are roughly daytime highs of 92-95 and higher and nighttime lows of roughly 72-75. Humidity plays a role in it too. I get better fruit set at very low humidity in very hot and very dry summers than at higher humidity in humid, muggy summers. Unfortunately, so far this is a humid and muggy summer for most of the state, although anyplace that still is in Extreme or Exceptional Drought likely has significantly lower humidity than the rest of us.

When the relative humidity is very low, I've had fruit set on tomato plants (Big Boy and Better Boy) when the high temps were around 108-111 and night time lows were 80-85, and the last couple of summers, the variety Phoenix (aptly named, perhaps) has set fruit at temperatures as high as 110-112 in late July and early August, but only because the humidity was bottoming out in the low teens and even in the single digits.

Dawn

Mia, Thanks for the heads up. I didn't know if or when to fertilize tomatoes. Do you also do this with peppers? Anything else?

Dawn, thanks for the clear explanation about why and how to fertilize tomatoes mid season.

I have a ton of small green tomatoes, no ripe ones yet. We had a very long cool spring that didn't break into summer until early June - 2-3 weeks ago, very late compared to recent years, and we are still cooler than normal. The toms are loaded with small fruit and flowers and the forecast is for a cooler period this weekend so I'll hit the toms (and peppers) with Super Bloom or a similar product then.

Thank you!!
Pam

Pam,

The reason we use this technique is merely to force the plants to have a nice bunch of blossoms during the time that a cool spell brings the temperatures down low enough for fruit set to occur.

The standard way to feed tomatoes in general (not when trying to manipulate them because of a cool spell in hot weather) is to wait until the first big round of fruit set, which it sounds like you have now, and then to feed them at that time in order to help them support the fruit they have and to encourage them to set more.

How you fertilize and how often depends on how you grow your tomatoes. Most organic growers focus more on feeding the soil and letting the soil feed the plants, although with heavy feeders like tomatoes, they usually still feed them with liquid seaweed, liquid fish emulsion, compost tea, etc., if they prefer a water soluble fertilizer, or with a dry fertilizer like Espoma Tomato Tone used as a top dressing periodically throughout the growing season, following the directions on the package. People who are not necessarily organic and who want to give their plants more nutrition than what might be available in their soil often use a water soluble tomato fertilizer every 2 weeks in the tomato growing season. People who raise tomatoes in containers often feed a highly diluted form of water soluble fertilizer every time they water or every other time they water since the constant watering needed by container plants constantly leaches nutrients out of the soil-less mix in the containers.

Peppers vary a great deal, so I'll divide it into two basic categories.

In our climate, with the heat and humidity we have, hot peppers tend to set fruit until it gets really, really hot. I think my hot peppers slow down fruit set once the daytime highs are above 105 degrees....or maybe it is when the nighttime lows are staying in the 80s or above. It is not as clear-cut and obvious with hot peppers as with tomatoes. If I shade the peppers with shade cloth (I use 50% shade cloth), they produce better in the heat and don't slow down much at all.

Sweet peppers, particularly sweet bell peppers, are a lot pickier about the heat, and they produce slowly in the midst of the hot summer but rebound and produce very heavily in the fall.

Peppers are very heavy feeders and, if you want to, you can push them pretty hard with fertilizer and they just gobble it up. Several Texas horticulturalists whose books and magazine articles I've read for years say that you can push peppers heavily with fertilizer, almost to the point of feeding them so much that you burn them. I've never pushed them that hard because I don't want to burn the roots. In fact, if I am going to be honest, I almost never feed anything I plant. I feed the soil and let the soil feed the plants. If I see pepper plants looking stressed in the summer, I try to make sure they have shade and consistent moisture and I don't necessarily feed them. I might feed the peppers once a summer, often in July when they seem to be getting tired of the heat. My peppers produce until frost gets them, so I've never felt like I have to rush them by pushing fertilizer on them. I don't fertilize much at all. If the soil is good and healthy before you plant, the plants do not necessarily need anything else.

Living where you do, where I would imagine the heavy rainfall that comes with tropical depressions, tropical storms, hurricanes and nor'easters likely does leach nutrients from the soil, you might find you need to feed your plants more regularly with a water-soluble fertilizer. Because of the issues associated with fertilizer runoff killing the sea life in the bay, you wouldn't want to feed the plants excessively when heavy rainfall is likely and would leach the fertilizer into the bay. You also likely have more humidity all the time than we do and that can make pollen sticky and affect fertilization, so you likely have some challenges we don't see as often here.

Some summers, once the heat arrives and shuts down fruit set on the tomato plants, we don't even get a cool spell with temperatures low enough to allow fruit set to happen. So, having one next week is a gift, and that's why we all are so excited. If the plants are able to set more fruit next week, those are the tomatoes we'll be picking in late summer. I am tired of picking tomatoes right now and thought about not even feeding my plants with a bloom booster, but then I thought about it and realized that the fruit we have on the plants now will ripen in July and there isn't anything coming along behind them for August. So, even though there is a tomato glut now, it isn't a summer-long glut. The fruit I am harvesting now pretty much set in late April through earliest June, depending on the variety, and won't last forever. If we get fruit set next week, that pretty much guarantees we'll be picking tomatoes in August, even though the August weather likely will be too hot for us to get more fruit set until the end of that month.

Dawn

Dawn - I do. I keep some around because right when things start to go into bloom, I use it and it works.....

Ezzirah, I think it works too. The key is just to do it far enough in advance that it has time to influence the plants and get them to bloom by the time the cool spell arrives.

I keep all sorts of stuff in my potting shed "just in case". I might not use those things often, but when you need them, it sure is easier to have it sitting there ready to be used.

I wish tomatoes would bloom and set fruit as easily and as prolifically as cucumbers do! My cucumber plants are producing ridiculous numbers of blooms and fruit and they don't care that it is hot, hot, hot.

I picked cucumbers all morning, and I mean I picked dozens of cucumbers until the heat drove me indoors. It is pickle-making time. I showed Tim three big bowls of tomatoes and told him he could bag them up and take them to work and give them away if he wanted to. I'm spending my canning time this year mostly on pickles and peppers, not tomatoes.

I need to go back out and pick corn but, dang, it is hot! I guess I'll do it anyway. It won't take long to pick it, and then I can process it. Our thermometer shows 100.4 degrees and the chickens looked hot and cranky, so I turned on a mister for them and they are playing in the water...and eating overly large cucumbers.

Dawn

ok it took me this long to get something to spray them with. It is Petes bloom booster. The phosphate is 30. Best I could do. I guess I need to spray them in the early morning when it is cooler? And how many days in a row do I spray or is it just 1 time. Thanks Sheila

Dawn, thanks for the explanation especially the tip of watering it before fertilizing. I wasn't sure if I fertilized my plants enough yesterday so I gave it a light application today for good measure.

I'm so jealous that you have so much cucumbers and peppers to process. I've just been picking a handful of veggies here and there but not enough to make it worth canning. I blame the slow start on May being so wet and cloudy. The first week it really got hot and sunny (about 3 weeks ago) I noticed all my hot weather plants (peppers, melons, sweet potatoes) started taking off.

I tried to eat a Boston pickling cuke raw and I won't be doing that again; but my Marketmore cukes tasted fantastic sliced up with a sprinkle of salt.

I picked 4 Boston pickling cukes the last couple of days and decided to ferment them in a quart mason jar. I also did a quart of jalapenos the same way. I've made sauerkraut and kimchi but this is my first try at fermenting cucumbers.

Cynthia

Dawn - this year I grew de bourbonne cucumber and they are growing so much so fast I cannot keep up! If all those flowers they have grow cukes, I am in trouble! LOL!

I made pickles last year and we never ate them! So I am looking for different things with cukes.

Now only if I could get my maters to do this...... :)

Cynthia,

The late cold weather has slowed down all our gardens this year. I only started harvesting appreciable yields of cucumbers last week. Better late than never though. I am really far south in OK in a portion of Love County that sticks down into Texas, so we actually have Texas to our west, south and east. Thus, most years our weather is more like the weather in Dallas-Fort Worth than the weather in OKC. That means my garden is usually 2-4 weeks ahead of gardens in central OK.

I try to can on a 2-year cycle so I can plant large numbers of whatever I want to can in abundance. Last year was a huge tomato year. I canned a 2-3 year supply of tomato sauce, salsa, pizza sauce, pasta sauce, catsup, chili base, etc. I also froze about 40 quarts of sauce, a similar amount of tomato purée, etc. and dehydrated oodles of regular sun-dried tomatoes and wine-marinated sun-dried tomatoes. I also still have 6 or 8 bags of processed tomato purée frozen in gallon bags. Each bag is the amount of tomatoes needed to make one batch of Annie's Salsa. The flip side of having done all that tomato preservation last year is that I cannot bear the thought of canning a single tomato this year as I remain totally burnt out on that idea following last summer. Luckily there is no need to can, freeze or dehydrate tomatoes at all this year.

With no canning plans for tomatoes, I planted a great many pickling cucumber plants, and also raised tons of potatoes, sweet corn, onions and garlic. Processing them for long term storage is keeping me busy. I also planted lots of peppers so that I can preserve a lot of them. Pepper canning usually doesn't start until July though.

I have pole beans in bloom now but saved the bush beans for the fall harvest. And, of course, there's oodles of winter squash but they won't produce a harvest for a while yet.

After spending too many 18-hour days harvesting and canning, dehydrating and blanching/freezing food last year, my goal this year was to not spend so much time on canning this summer. So far it is working out so well that I feel like a slacker! Now that the cucumber harvest has begun in earnest, so will my canning season. However, just because I have not been canning a great deal so far doesn't mean that I'm not preserving food. I've put up lots of sweet
corn in the deep freeze and am working on processing taters and onions.

I need for next year to be a good tree fruit season or my canning cycle will be all messed up. The late freezes got the peaches and plums this year.

I am about to head outside in a couple of minutes to pick cucumbers again, and then I'll make pickles. I have cukes growing in three separate fenced veggie garden spots and yesterday I only picked cucumbers from one of them. This morning Ill be picking cures from the two other areas.

Dawn

Well, after i hit my plants with the bloom booster, the very next day(today) i have some pretty good leaf roll going on with the 2 plants that i am having so much trouble with fruit set on. In fact, i dont have a single fruit set on either of these plants, but the other 6 i have are just fine.

Any ideas?

Emma

They've lowered our forecast! We're still in the 90's most of the week, but it's the lower 90's instead of upper and July 4th we have a high of 88. That doesn't happen here in July. And not only that, but it's supposed to rain. That doesn't happen in July either! I'm excited.

Leslie

Also, while i was already feeding, i hit all my patio container flowers with some bloom booster. It seems to have stressed them out as well. I got my watering can out and sprinkled all of them, except the tomatos. I guess i will do tomorrow pr sunday of the tomatos still looked stressed.

Or sooner of amyone advises me to do so.

All of my plants had been watered very well before i used the bloom booster. Thats why i waited to do it so that i could do ot with my watering schedule.

Thanks

Emma

This stuff must really work, I sprayed almost everything late yesterday evening. I went out this morning before sun up and found 3 Seminole pumpkin blooms, and the plans were still wet. It must not work on imports, because my Brazilian squash still don't have any blooms. I have not noticed much difference in the tomatoes yet.

Larry

Sheila, Just feed them with it once. You don't want to overdose the plants.

Ezzirah, Cucumbers will just about kill you with their productivity some years. I just feed the excess ones to the chickens, or sometimes I slice the excess cucumbers in half and line them up in a row out in the back pasture, where wildlife will feast on them at night. Normally, after I've made all the pickles we want, I just yank out the pickling cucumber plants and put something else there in their space.

Emma, With the two tomato plants that are not producing, do you remember what variety or varieties they are?

Leaf roll/leaf curl can occur for many reasons. Physiological leaf roll is common in a spring/summer with weather like we've had lately----and is especially common when you've just made the transition from a very wet period of spring-like weather to very hot summer weather. Extremely windy weather can cause it. It often is just an indicator of stress, and for tomato plants, there are many causes of plant stress here in OK. Most of the time, the leaves will uncurl on their own and the plants will be productive, whether the leaves are normal or curled.

However, there are times that leaf roll or leaf curl signify other things---anything from herbicide drift, herbicide contamination of the soil, high wind, excess fertilization, and plant viruses. With the type caused by a virus, there isn't much you can do. The plants tend to go ahead and produce good tomatoes anyhow.

Is there any chance that there was herbicide residue in the sprayer you used to spray the water soluble fertilizer? That would be the first thing I'd think about.

The tomatoes in my front garden, or at least some of them, have had leaf roll for a month now, but the ones out back and the ones in the containers haven't had it. We hit 105 degrees the other day, and leaves on the tomatoes out back promptly curled up and said something that sounded like "we hate this hot weather". In a few days, after enjoying some cooler weather, their foliage likely will return to normal. The plants in containers don't have leaf roll yet, but they get more shade and more protection from the wind.

I'd leave the plants alone and only water if they need it. There are so many things that cause leaf curl that you cannot be sure what caused it. The ones in my front garden that have it likely were hit by drift from a herbicide spill (not caused by us and I don't know how or when it happened) that killed about a 20' x 20' area of grass alongside the road about 100' east of my garden. Tim and I noticed the dead grass one day, and a couple of days later I had curly tomato leaves. I expect the plants will be okay, and if I am wrong in assuming the leaf roll on our leaves was caused by whatever killed the grass, then I expect my tomatoes have a virus. There are tons of viruses that affect tomatoes and at least some of them can cause leaf roll.

Larry, That's pretty speedy results! It may be Seminole was about to start blooming anyhow. I got fruit set on Seminole about a week ago, and now have fruit set on Long Island Cheese and Old TImey Cornfield Pumpkin as well. Those Brazilian squash must be operating on Brazilian time......

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Leaf Curl/Leaf Roll

Dawn,

I ended up just using my watering can to use the MC bloom booster. It has never had an herbicide in it. I never did use the Sevin as i think i got all the little worms, caterpillars, etc. Herbicide drift would be difficult in my location, as i sit very very far away from anyone, in the middle of 100 acres.

I dont overwater or underwater them. They get full sun all day as they are on the SW side of the house.

Now, originally, it was only one plant that had leaf curl and blossom drop. Now its two plants that have the leaf curl.

I do Not remember the names of the plants, bit i was thinking box car willie? Possibly. They remind me a bit of it when i planted it one year as well.

Heres my issue now. ALL of my plants are having 100% blossom drop except for the Husky Red.

Old blossoms, medium age blossoms, tiny new blossoms. Even the plants that werent having it before and have fruit on them are now dropping all blossoms, even the ones formed during this cold spell. Even the brand new buds, you can see the tiny ring on the stem where it will turn yellow and all off in a few days.

I dont understand why, it may just be some bad plants who know, but i guess i will just leave them and see what happens.

I can try and post some pictures if anyone wants to see and thinks maybe they can figure put whats going on.

Thanks

Emma

Emma, I am sorry to hear how bad your blossom drop is. This has been my worst blossom drop year, but I only losing about 50% to 60% of them, plus I have a lot of disease. This is the 4th year I have planted tomatoes in the same spot and I know that can not be helping my problem. My older tomatoes are the worst looking ones.
I pulled and burned a Mortgage lifter today, but it did have 6 pretty good looking tomatoes on it. My best looking plant is a seedless tomato plant that was given to me and was planted late in an area that had never had tomatoes grown in it before, and was mulched at planting time.

I would like to see a picture, not that I can help, but that I may be able to learn from what the others may say.

Larry

Larry,

I will go take some pics and see if i can get them to post from my laptop. It may be later tonight or tomorrow before i can do it.

Im sorry to hear you are having problems too. It may be that i need to pull these plants as well.

Hope you all have a Happy 4th of July!!!!
I

I experienced the same thing on all of those I fed one evening. They were both in ground and container plants. Most of the foliar feeds I use or have used say not to apply when temps are above 80 degrees. So I wait till late in the evening around dark to apply. I also added a very small amount of molasses to the mix which I have done before. I was soil drenching a few also and I mix 2.5 gallons at a time. All of them I did that evening had curled leaves the next afternoon. I really stressed them somehow. It was like 81 degrees when I checked just before I applied it. Not sure what caused it. I applied the same mix at the same strength two nights before with no problems and the next evening applied to the 5 plants in the raised bed and none of them curled. I think it has to do with the weather conditions being just right. I skipped one evening as it was too hot even at 9:45 pm. I never apply in the morning. When the cooler temps arrived they all looked ok. I've been in the garden all morning but haven't really looked to see how they are handling the heat. The peppers are drooping a little. But that is to be expected after 3-4 cool days. So yes it very well could of been the booster. I've seen it before. It doesn't surprise me but puzzles me as to why many times. I probably won't feed all of the plants again. May spot feed a few that have no set if another cool spell appears to be headed our way. Hopefully your plants will line out. I wouldn't judge the blossom drop until another 3-4 days has passed. The blooms dropping now could still be from the heat of a week ago. The effects of the heat will linger for several days. If a plant is stressed it will drop blossoms. And with the curl I would say yours were. I'm seeing a little the last few days on the plants that curled the worst. I'm for sure no expert but do pay attention to what I see in my garden. I yanked the first diseased plant Tuesday. It had TSWV. The heat stressed it enough that it really progressed fast. I felt something was wrong for a several days. But the leaves didn't show the tell tale signs till Sunday. I just hope no more are infected. I should of yanked it when I first started having doubts about it. Jay

Jay, my first instinct was that it was the bloom booster. I applied in the evening when it had cooled down to under 80, but the very next day it reached 102 degrees. The day after that is when the cool front hit. I noticed the leaf curl the day after i applied the bloom booster. I also hit all my patio plants with it as well and killed a few of them. I followed the directions to a T, so i think that it just stressed them to the max because of the heat the next day, but im puzzled as to why it didnt do it to everything.....

Perhaps a combination of the bloom booster, the heat and the wind and possibly the plants are diseased..... Although other than leaf roll and blossom drop, they appear healthy ( well, other than a tad bit more spindly than i like to see) It will be a shame if i dont get any fruit off these plants. They have the potential to produce some giant fruit, because in addition to regular blooms, im also getting a lot of super blooms on the 2 most affected plants, very BIG super blooms! Sure would be nice to see how big one of them would get.

I have 5 plants in the raised bed, only 2 of them got leaf roll, and at the time only 2 were having blossom drop issues. (i think i said one earlier, but i meant 2) now they are all dropping all the blossoms, even the brand new ones that formed during the cold spell.

2 of my 3 container tomatos are dropping all blossoms, except the husky red, i just went and looked at it again and noticed leaf roll at the top of the plant, but have tons of blossoms and no sign they will drop.

I am definitely going to post pictures of every plant i have today or tomorrow because i am just flabbergasted.

I guess in the end, they will either form a tomato or not, im just wanting to see if anyone can say Ah Ha!! I know what that is!! For future reference.

On a positive note, my husky has about 15 or 20 on it and ive already picked 4 from it, the bonnie patio tomato has about ten and ive already picked 2 from it, which is amazing because its not even a foot tall and one other container one that i dont know what it is has about 15 and one of the raised bed ones has about 10 on it, so i know i will get at least 50 tomatos to eat and thats a darn sight better than none!

Of those, i have 5 that will be ready to pick tomorrow! Im excited to get that many!

Emma

Emma there is no doubt in my mind that mine was bloom booster related and yours was likely also. I've seen it before and why I skipped the day that was 108 and it still caused some curling. I only had the leaf curl on 2-3 plants when I applied it and the next afternoon it was on every plant I applied it too (35-40) and those I didn't looked fine. Many times we will never know the answer. We had winds that night and the next day. I feel the combination along with the heat stressed them enough to cause it. I look forward to seeing your pictures. Jay