> I'm not so worried about the safety factor. The problem is that the tomatoes are dried to a crunch and I've since found out that because they are that dry, they won't absorb the oil. What do you mean you found out? You heard it somewhere, or you tried them? If you tried them, how long had they been in the oil? I'm asking because it doesn't make sense to me -- I would think that, if anything, more dry would mean more absorption. But I bet it takes a few months, either way. >I should have only dried them to the leathery stage. I'm wondering now, since I saw wine used in one recipe, if I could strain off the oil, then mix them with the wine to slightly rehydrate them, then repack them in the jar with the oil? If it were me, I would fish out, like, 3 slices and try the wine thing on them, see if it's worth the nbother :). They might absorb the wine, or their oil coating might prevent that. But the result can't be anything but delicious either way, right?

Good morning fellow venters, gardeners and insomniacs, Look who's talking here Carol. You were up as late as Dawn, and had the first post of the morning. I'm not out there sunrise picking. Ain't nothing to pick. After coffee, I'm still going back to bed. (Maybe). I started this at 8:00 AM and it's 10AM now. I was up late making yogurt from raw cow's milk. Trying to restore my bones and health. Anyone else do that on here I wonder? I finally found a local pristine source of grassfed Jersey cow's milk. Love it! My folks had a little Jersey cow for me as a toddler and beyond. Yup, I'm trying to talk Braum's into joining the so-called new raw milk revolution, which isn't actually new but practically as old as the earth itself. DS wouldn't touch the stuff unless it comes from a carton. My doctor thinks adults don't need and shouldn't use milk. Strange. Anyways, what he doesn't know won't hurt me. You have my sympathies, on the Japanese beetles or any other nationality. And I can relate to Dawn's woes on the gazillion hoppers. I've never seen so many. Are we going to have a revival of the Great Locust invasion? Lord, I hope not! I can remember when my first born son was a baby and we lived at Waukomis, near Vance AFB near Enid. We had a grasshopper invasion of biblical proportions. Carrying DBS in one day, a huge hopper jumped up and bit him on the ear drawing blood. Like everyone else, I hate and dread hoppers. I read on the Internet, grasshoppers were the only insect ever to be fought by using dynamite. It would be an LOL if it weren't so sad to see how destructive these things are. Do you think we're under a curse? Makes one wonder. Back to venting...it's now officially open season on veggie, melon poachers, & chicken thieves, but MUST we be restricted to just those, and not their other creative endeavors of how to rip people off? Carol, having been an AF wife, maybe you can relate to this...you know how it would make one feel to have a young DH die, leaving 3 young sons without a dad, and a young wife to raise them. So, this was my first departure from living a relatively sheltered life after my DH died. I had rented my house to these people while we were in Texas to check it out to see if we wanted to make a permanent move. Boy, was I naive back then. They were supposed to make a monthly deposit to my bank account for the rent payment to cover the cost of my own mortgage payment. They didn't. I finally had to come back and have them evicted. After moving back in, someone came to the door wanting to haul off all my furniture. These "renters" had taken out loans using my furniture as collateral and then defaulted on the loans. As bad as that was, the worst was they'd broken into a locked storage unit, and stolen the carefully folded US flag from my DH's military funeral, which had been kept for my DS's. One of the few but most precious remembrances of him. Then, not too long after that, we were having dinner at a local restaurant, and here these people were sitting across from us, eating lobster dinners, including their two preschool kids. Since of entitlement? I guess. That was the beginning of a long list of other lessons learned along the way. One of the interesting things I've made mental notes on to stop doing for, were those who complained about what you gave them and then walked off not even saying thanks. Maybe you've never had that happen, but I have, and it's always left me scratching my head, because I would never give anyone something that wasn't fit to use, or good to eat. Well, this list of mine could go on and probably will. One of the signs of advancing age is when one starts rambling. 2nd cup of coffee later:) Dawn, there is NO way I am going to go out in this weather, even in knee high rubber boots picking plums in fence rows braving snakes, in order to make jam or jelly, even if I have to buy plum and blackberry jam til mine start producing better. Those folks that do are welcome to all the plums and blackberries they can pick. Every rock and bush out there has a snake somewhere around it. Now, I watch every step I take even in my own garden where I feel relatively safe. Knowing y'all are busy with harvesting and preserving, I'll try to keep my dumb gardening questions and traumas to a minimum. I think it's just absolutely lovely envisioning all the wonderful things in your pantry, and root cellar. Carol, the one thing I regret making from last summer was all that pickled squash. Most of it is still sitting in the pantry. I guess could still be kept for several years if a famine hits. The great squash famine. With my luck and squash bugs, ya never know. Stay cool y'all, it's supposed to be pressure cooker hot again today. Barbara

Tracy, I am so sorry to hear the problem is spreading. And you've been having such a good tomato year too, haven't you? White mold in the garden could be Southern Blight but there are other white molds as well. Southern Blight is common in hot, wet soil. Y'all may not have southern blight there in Arizona though. I always thought Southern Blight needed high humidity in order to thrive and grow. I haven't seen in often in anyone's plants, and have only had it on one plant in my garden in all my years of growing both in Texas and here, but it can be very common in hot, wet springs and summers. Ironically, the name of the tomato plant killed by Southern Blight was Southern Night! I'll link the part of the TAMU Problem Solver section about Southern Blight. The good thing about southern blight is it has very distinct symptoms so you can rule it in or out easily. I'd still think it is more likely your plants have bacterial wilt or fusarium or something else unless you definitely see the southern blight symptoms described by TAMU. The one time I had it, it killed exactly one plant. It was my first year to plant tomatoes in that spot and the soil was not yet as well-amended as it would be after a few years of soil amending, and I had problems that first year or two here(including cotton root rot) that haven't been a problem since then. Once I fixed the soil, they went away. Hopefully whatever is killing your plant is not something systemic that can persist in the soil. (You'd think Arizona's heat would naturally solarize the soil and prevent most diseases!) Here's a more detailed description of southern blight from my tomato disease book: The first symptom on seedlings (it can cause damping off in seedlings) is a dark brown lesion at or below the soil line. Stem tissue is invaded completley, causing plant death. On older plants the lesion girdles the stem which can cause the plant foliage to wilt without a change in the color of the foliage. Severe infection will cause the plants to die. Over time the brown lesion expands and causes root rot below the soil line and can extend several centimeters above the soil line. When adequate moisture is present, a white fungal growth will cover the surface of the lesion and sclerotia from 1-2 mm in size are readily produced. If your infected plants had fruit on them, you can see lesions and the scleroria on the fruit too. Since the fungas is an efficient saprophyte, it can survive for several years in soil and plant debris. (I wouldn't compost the sick plants!) Disease development is favored by high temperatures (85-96 degrees) and high moisture levels in the soil. Usually when a commercial field is hit with southern blight, the solution is a three year crop rotation program with either corn or sorghum being grown in at last one of the other years. They used to use field fumigation to fix the infected soil when I was a kid growing up in Texas, but I don't know if they still use those soil fumigants in commercial production or not. They stopped selling them to home gardeners long ago. Take your soil's temperature and see what you get. Most years, my plants have 4" of mulch atop the soil surface to keep their roots cool. On a hot day when the high temperature hits 105 or higher, my soil can easily hit 110-120 in unmulched areas. You can use an everyday kitchen meat thermometer with a probe. In Oklahoma, the OK Mesonet weather monitoring sites take the soil temp at various depths--I think it is 2", 4" and 10", and it always shocks me how hot soil can be when it is bare. It is somewhat better underneath sod and much better under deep, thick mulch. To figure out what to do about the soil, first you have to have an accurate diagnosis from a plant or soil pathologist unless you're definitely seeing the mycelium and sclerotia and there's no doubt in your mind that it is Southern Blight. Do you have a plant pathology lab available to you via your state's Ag Extension Service? It is possible that with the addition of compost and Actinovate or something similar you can rehab the soil. Do you rotate your tomato plantings to a different area each year? That helps mitigate the tendency for soil diseases to build up to high levels in one spot that it continuously planted. Carol, I agree with you on the plants' survival. I'm sure I'm spending more money that it is worth to keep my peppers, cukes, melons, okra and southern peas producing, but it makes me happy. I gave up on the tomatoes. No mater how well I watered them, they were just roasting in the heat. A few are hanging in there, probably because they get some water when I water the peppers in the same bed, but anything not watered is a lovely shade of "drought brown" and I can understand why. Today will be our 20th consecutive day of 100 degrees or higher, assuming we hit 100 and I imagine we will. Our forecast for the next week includes highs of 100 or higher every day, and next week the highs will be in the 105 range. FYI, as a former southern Oklahoma, you might like to know that KXII says we've set a new record for most consecutive days of 100 or higher. (sigh) I can't believe that record wasn't set in 1980 or that, if it was, we have already surpassed it. We have another 1 to 2 months of possible 100-degree days ahead unless a major weather pattern change occurs, and none is forecast. I picked sunscalded bell peppers (the ones from the Goilath seed collection have been producing like crazy despite the insane heat) yesterday, cut off the scalded portion, and sliced/froze a lot of them for fajitas. I harvested 19 bells off two plants, but only the few that were highest on the plant had sunscald. If you're struggling to provide enough water this year, what hope is there for anyone else? The soil here is the worst I've ever seen it. I'm starting to worry that one of our little kittens will fall down one of the big wide cracks in the ground and disappear. Tracy, I don't think it will hurt to fertilize lightly, but I wouldn't fertilize heavily. In its own way, fertilizing stresses plants because it pushes them to grow when they'd rather not, and sick plants are already stressed. Pat, Shade almost always helps. I keep shade cloth in my potting shed for just that purpose, and I don't plant anything near walls here, having learned long ago that the plants next to a wall roast in the summer months. I grow vines on my shed wall to keep heat from reflecting off the shed wall and onto nearby plants. I have a tall pecan tree west of my garden and use its shade to provide afternoon heat relief to some plants. The ones that get partial shade during the afternoon are much happier than those that don't. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Southern Blight

Sheri, It seems like every year I plant at least some of my fall tomatoes earlier and earlier. This year I got the earliest ones in the ground in mid-June, and they had green tomatoes on them by August. Now, in a normal year, the July-August weather might have been too hot for blossoms to set fruit, but this wasn't a normal year. Other ways you can protect fall tomatoes from the first freeze or two: 1) Set up 3-gallon or larger buckets, pots, wastepaper baskets, etc. alongside the tomato plants you want to save. Fill them with water. The water will act as a 'heat sink', soaking up heat from the sun all day, and then releasing the heat at night as the water cools off. The heat released by the water helps keep the plants a little warmer. 2) Run a string or two of Christmas lights down the row of tomato cages or trellis. Leave them on at night. The heat from the lights warms up the air around the plants a little. This works best if you use the larger Christmas lights, and not the really small ones. It also works better if the plants are covered since the cover helps hold in the heat. 3) If you have a handful of plants you really, really want to protect, keep a few bags of dry autumn leaves or a couple of hay bales handy. When the first freeze is expected, grab handfuls of the hay or leaves and shake them gently over the tomatoes. The idea is that the leaves or hay fall gently onto the plants, creating warm pockets of air and covering the leaves/fruit as much as possible to keep frost/cold air away. You don't want to pack down the hay or leaves tightly because that will crush the plants. The hay and leaves insultate the plants a little. When I do this, I usually just put the hay and leaves inside the tomato cages. Anything that sticks out of the hay will probably freeze. 4) Cover the plants as we previously discussed. If you do this in combination with the lights, be sure the fabric doesn't make contact with the lights or the fabric may scorch or ignite. If you don't cover the plants, you can position a fan to blow air towards the plants. This light 'breeze' can help keep frost from settling on the plants. 5) If you want to try saving only a couple of choice plants, place a large plastic or rubber trash can over the plant. You may not be able to save all of the plant, but you can probably save some of the it. Last spring, I used a combination of buckets of water (the large jugs and buckets that cat litter comes in are great for this), hay, straw, and covering the plants with cloth OR plastic ('cause the plants were small and the plastic didn't touch them) to protect the tomato plants (the early ones I put into the ground in mid-March) from a late, two-week spell of freezing weather, cold rain, hard frost, etc. All the effort was worth it to me to save those spring tomatoes but I doubt I'd go to that much trouble for fall tomatoes. One of the hardest things in the world, though, is standing in your garden and looking at green, healthy tomato plants full of blooms and fruit, knowing the first frost is headed your way. I hate knowing that the veggie gardening season is 'over'! Dawn