Gmshack - I have read of using both plastic and Agribon, but haven't gotten around to the plastic part yet. There are two main issues with overwintering and some studies suggest that dehydration is a bigger problem than cold tolerance in cold climates. I used drew 51's technique of Wilt Stop this fall, so we will see if it prevented desiccation. I also used two layers of Agribon. I find that one layer does not provide the protection that the company claims. I start covering mine around late August when our first frost hit. This is both to protect berries and reduce temperature shock from early season frosts. In the spring, I am leaving the Agribon on for a few weeks. This next spring I will leave it on until each variety begins to flower. This substantially increases growth for me (in our very cool Mays) and hastens flowering by a few weeks. I do remove it on days with temps over 70F. Desiccation is a real problem for me since our ground is frozen solid for at least 6 months out of the year. Add to this that preliminary probing this last summer suggested that blackberry roots up here only extend 3 or 4 inches into the ground (it is too cold below that, with an average annual temperature at 3 ft of around 31F). In this situation I believe that the roots cannot take up water to replace what the canes transpire during the winter and they end up desiccating and dying way back (from 8-10 ft long to about 2 ft). We will see. As far as the weed block, it will probably not increase the soil temperature as much as removing it. I'm not sure of this as I don't have experience with it in the Lower 48. Up here, it must be removed in the spring for about 4 weeks to allow the soil to thaw and then reapplied. Your soil is already thawed and substantially warmer, so you shouldn't have to do this. What I think I get from weed block is increased heat above it = though I have no data to show that. I just know that of two Wild Treasure plants I have (that are one year different in age), the one grown over weed block is much more vigorous than the other. I trellised the very vigorous one last year and it continued to grow strong even though most of the canes were not directly lying on the weed block. A study at Oregon State Univ. also supports this. However, Wild Treasure is a crown-forming variety, not a spreading variety like the ones you have, so covering around it with weed block is a simple process. I do not grow primocane blackberries because the season is too short and there is insufficient heat. Everyone of them has died completely. I have one Triple Crown left and a very wimpy (it grew 2 whole inches this year) Chester. Neither has canes that survive - but then I have not covered them. I am guessing that if your TC canes survive and leaf out, but don't flower, that the flower buds are damaged by the cold. Flower buds on many plants are much less tolerant of cold than non-flowering buds. I have two varieties of erect blackberries that I am trialing that might be of interest to you. They are Nelson and Stenulson. Stenulson has been in the ground for several years, but moose have browsed it down each year and voles girdled anything that was left. Thus, I don't have an idea of its ripening season, but it is likely too late for me. It grows pretty well here and is spreading (unlike TC and Chester which only get smaller each year). I have had a few green canes survive the winter and start to leaf out and then die because they were girdled by voles at the base, so it is pretty hardy (though these were covered by snow mid-winter, when air temps dropped as low as -35F). I just got Nelson last year and it actually flowered earlier than any other erect I have. Its berries are somewhat frost tolerant, as well, to at least 28F. It still did not ripen early enough, but it was in a pot and not established. The timing could change in the future, especially if I put an Agribon "sack" over it early in the season. Both of these are thorny. I got Balsor's Hardy Black from the USDA germ plasm repository this fall, but it failed to root before it rotted. This is another possibility, but it is not commercially available in the US. Happy New Year!

Shelley, Viva Italia is pretty compact--reaching maybe 3 or 3.5' in height. It doesn't spread out a whole lot, so you can plant them closer together than you'd plant an indeterminate. I prefer indeterminates because tomato plants that are 6 to 8' tall generally give me a larger harvest than those that are 3' tall. It makes sense as there is twice as much plant there with the taller varieties. Heat tolerance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What a person considers heat tolerant can hinge, largely, on what level of heat their area has. A hot summer in Pennsylvania, for example, is not the same thing as a hot summer in southern Oklahoma. I have not noticed that Viva Italia is any more or less heat-tolerant than any other paste tomato. For me, paste tomatoes set fruit in hotter weather in the summer than slicers do, and since they do that, I tend to think of all pastes, as a group, as being better heat-setters than slicers and beefsteaks. I don't necessarily notice a huge difference between paste varieties in terms of which one is still setting fruit when my daytime high is 95 versus 98 versus 102, but it is clear to me that they continue setting fruit in July long after the heat and humidity have shut down most slicing types. The spacing of tomatoes is a hugely complicated subject. I vary my spacing from year to year, depending on the variety I'm planting as well as what sort of weather I am expecting. I space them farther apart if it is going to be a wet year because they will get a lot bigger, and space them more closely if I expect a drier year. I space them farther apart if I know from experience that the variety I'm planting grows into big monster plants. I space them more closely if experience has shown me that they tolerate closer spacing. I might space them more closely in a bed that's been super-enriched that year with the addition of tons of compost, and might space them farther apart if that bed didn't get much compost lately. So, I cannot tell you how closely I space tomato plants because I vary the spacing from year to year, and even from one raised bed to another in one year. In general, three foot spacing is fine, and four feet is better for the largest indeterminates. You can space some determinates 2' apart although 3' apart is better. Some years I want to grow too much of everything and cram plants in much more close to one another than I should. What works for one variety doesn't work for another. You just have to experiment with different spacing in different situations until you learn what works for you in your soil and with your temperature and with your moisture levels. With Tess' Land Race Currant, I don't like to plant anything within 4 or 5' on any side of it because it is a monster plant. It would be smarter to just plant it out in the middle of the yard where there's nothing within 8' of it. So, you have to know your plants and how they grow in your soil in the average year in order to determine what spacing works best for you. Closer spacing often gives you fewer fruit per plant, but if it enables you to plant more plants in the square footage you have available to you, you still might get a larger harvest overall. I always plant 4 times as many tomato plants as I need (though never as many as I'd truly love to plant) and I plant them twice as close together as I know I should. Virtually every year I get all the tomatoes we can eat fresh, all the tomatoes I wish to can, dehydrate or freeze, and still have plenty to give away, so I won't change planting that closely....but I wouldn't necessarily recommend such close spacing to someone else because I don't know what their soil, their moisture levels, and their weather will allow. Make sense? In a perfect world, I'd plant my indeterminate tomato plants 4' apart in rows 6' apart, but in the real world, they are lucky if I plant them in 3' apart in rows 2' apart. I'll have a two-foot pathway, then a 4 or 5-foot wide raised bed that has two rows of tomato plants, then another 2' wide path, then another raised bed. I don't even measure how far apart they are. I just eyeball it, though I've done it long enough that I can eyeball it pretty well. What works for me with the soil I have and the fertility level it has reached after 15 years of improvement might not work for someone else with different soil. So, spacing is something you have to master for yourself in your own conditions. Because the heat tends to shut down production at some point in June or July, I try to get all my canning done in June and the first part of July, and then I can just yank out the paste tomato plants and focus on other parts of the garden. Usually by mid-July, I've 'had it up to here" (lol) with canning tomatoes and am ready to move on to making pickles or canning peppers or whatever. Some people in some parts of the country that cannot put their plants into the ground until late May or early June haven't even starting canning tomatoes yet, and there I am already done....and glad to be done. Canning in August when the high temps are 105 to 110 or even higher is not my favorite activity. I'd rather be done with all the canning before we get that hot. Finally, the single factor that plays the greatest role in what sort of fruit set I get in any given year is simply how early I can get the tomato plants into the ground. My average last frost date is March 28 but we usually have a freezing night about once a week through the first week in May. If I waited until May to put transplants into the ground, it likely would get too hot for fruitset before they even had time to flower and set fruit, so I'd have to wait until autumn to harvest tomatoes. Instead, I plant as early as I possibly can, cover up the plants with floating row cover when cold weather threatens, and do whatever I can to get those plants flowering and setting fruit before the heat sets in. This involves lots of guess work and lots of hand-wringing when April brings an Easter snow storm a month after I put tomato plants in the ground. Heat tolerance will carry you and your tomatoes only so far, but you can win the war by planting early, early, early. Gordon Graham liked to put his tomato plants in the ground two months prior to his last frost date in Edmond, and he often had to stack two WOWs on top of one another to protect his tomato plants from late freezes or frosts or snow or sleet. I have a sloping garden so WOWs don't work for me....they just topple over and roll downhill when I fill them with water. I use floating row cover instead, and in some years when early warm weather was followed by snow around Easter, I have built low tunnels of PVC pipe and 6 mm greenhouse plastic and kept the tomato plants covered by the low tunnels for almost 3 weeks. Since our weather seldom cooperates with us, we just have to work around it in order to achieve the garden harvest we want when we want it. My best tomato year in ages was in 2012 when I was able to start putting tomato plants in the ground around March 10th. We still got really hot in June and were really dry in July and August, but the plants had set huge loads of fruit in April and May, so that I was able to just keep harvesting them pretty deeply into summer. A year with an early last freeze like that is pretty rare---maybe once a decade or, in a really good decade, maybe twice. I correctly concluded, based on the January and February weather, that I could plant in March that year and it all worked out. However, you're really just guessing when you take that sort of risk and it can just as easily not work out. If my soil temperatures and air temperatures are in the right range for the tomato plants, I'll plant early more often than not. It is the air temps and the soil temps that either allow the tomato plants to grow or not, not a specific date on a calendar, so I tend to plant when my brain tells me to, not when a calendar says it should be safe. As erratic as our weather is, I almost never do things the same way two years in a row. That is part of what makes gardening fascinating.....it is like playing chess with the weather and you have to use whatever strategy it takes to help you win the game. Tracy, I was sort of assuming that TLC would have BI seeds, but didn't want to guess. Thanks for confirming that. Carol, Thanks for linking the recipe. Dawn

Beth found another free leaf pattern that will work great for the 3rd quarter paper piece project. The full instructions at Quilters Cache show 4 blocks, each 6x6, sewn together to form a 12" square, but you can just do one 6x6 for this lotto. Palm Leaf Paper Piece Block Thanks Beth! Kate

Annette - a dry future in the long-term would sure be a change for much of B.C. - I assume you're not in the Okanagan where dry is currently fairly normal...? How hot and dry this summer will be here is now the big question.... Last summer was cooler than normal and a bit drier in our garden than 2013 (644 mm. Apr.-Oct. in 2014 vs. 674 mm. in 2013) but higher than the average here (563 mm. - 22.15") Rainfall here can vary a lot from month to month and year to yearbut, luckily so far at least, dry periods have been temporary, unlike what some of you have been suffering through! I'm not sure what long-term climate impacts are expected to be here. other than hotter! Precipitation forecasts seem to be more uncertain for here. peren.all - we've now had a few days with highs above freezing and even some drizzle overnight last night. There is now grass and bare ground appearing around the neighbourhood finally. With warm temperatures and even some rain in the forecast for the next few days, I hope the snow will be gone soon! Then it's supposed to get cold again mid next week :-( Temperatures don't reliably warm up here until the jetstream retreats north of Hudson Bay - and stays there! That's usually mid-April or later. It's not uncommon for me to be gardening with a ski jacket on in the first half of May! daves10 - are those magnolias? Ours bloom 2nd-3rd week of May (Picture below is May 22 2014). The neighbours' star magnolia is the first to bloom, in April.