For the 2008 Notes, please click here.

Bill Simpson wrote a note. I will share it below.

"I have a question for you. When one has a number of different tomato plants in the same area does cross pollination become a factor? Years back we had a roma or plum plant that gave us these big tomatoes. They were still in the roma or plum shape, but 2-3 times bigger than the normal size. Should different tomatoes be separated?

I remember when we did a varieties of corn and they cross pollinated. We got ears of corn with hardly any kernels on them. Like I said before, we learn a lot the hard way."

Here is my reply.

Sorry it took so long to get back to you. No, the shape of tomato blossoms is such that they are self fertile, and it is only with some work that breeders can cross pollinate them. If you have a pollination or setting problem, that problem is probably due to conditions inside the plant. Because Tomatoes are virtually self polinating, that explains why adding certain nutrients to soil will help blossoms set on fruit, and also why the 'tomato set' spray also seems to help do the same. It is highly unlikely that tomatoes will cross pollinate.

October 2007, From Bill Simpson:

2007 TOMATOES

My goal in growing tomatoes is to be eating vine ripened tomatoes in July. I'm able to do that by planting determinate plants like the Bush Early Girl. I get my ripe tomatoes by July 15, but I pay a price for that. The quality is lacking even though it still blows away anything you're buying at the grocery store, and these hybrid plants are prone to a lot more problems. I'm willing to wait till August 1st for that vine ripe tomato off an Heirloom plant here in Casper Wyoming, but it hasn't found me yet. So Fred, what do you think I'll get first? A 7 point bull, 8 lb walleye or a big fat ripe tomato off a heirloom plant in early August? Until then here's a report of the tomato plants we planted this year.

BUSH EARLY GIRL - I'm always amazed how these small plants get so loaded with tomatoes. They have a strong acidic flavor that keeps them from the blue ribbon category. My plants will develop problems as the season goes on. The first ripe one was picked on July 10.

2007: Heavily loaded Bush Early Girl Tomato. Picture by Bill Simpson.

BUSH BEEFSTEAK - A bigger determinate plant with bigger fruit. Well into August before anything ripened. The healthiest plant we had this year.

CAMPBELL'S 1327 - The fastest and best germinating plant this year, but then went down hill. That could be because of our conditions or ? It would be interesting to see what these plants did for some one else.

LEGEND - But not in Wyoming. It was suppose to be great if you have a problem with blight. I guess my problem isn't blight, because they got yanked in July.

SUB-ARTIC PLENTY - It sounded like these should be a big cherry tomato. The ones we got were alot bigger and not as early as they claim. I don't know why we would plant them again.

February 2007, From Bill Simpson:

2006 TOMATOES

Each year you learn some things and this year was no different. First we got only 2% of our seeds to germinate, because I couldn't keep a constant soil temperature. So we ended up buying tomato plants locally. The second big discovery was the constant disease problem I thought we had is actually a mineral deficiency. If the soil is lacking in any of the 13 mineral nutrients that plants need to grow healthy, it can show up in the plants appearance. Plus sandy soil like ours is famous for having nutrients leeched out of it. All the different fertilizers we've used only have a few of these nutrients, but you need to take in account that I'm cheap and only bought the low priced stuff. So we learned that 1-2 inches of compost each year is as important as water is to healthy plants. That gets those valuable micro-nutrients back into the soil. Plus it's important to remember "More IS NOT better" and stay away from fresh manure.

When we first bought this place and started our tomatoes, we were getting blossom end rot like crazy. So we learned that our sandy soil wasn’t holding a constant amount of moisture. I wish I had started putting my one inch of compost in the soil back then. So we watered them more and more each year and the blossom end rot went away. Then the "Bush Early Girl" hybrid came out and became one of our favorite tomato plants, but we were getting bad leaf curl on all the plants. Well, it turns out that was from too much watering.

So we want everybody out there looking through their seed catalogs to remember if the soil and water isn’t right it doesn’t matter how special those seeds are.

December 2006, From Bill Simpson:

THE GREENHOUSE


I built a small 8x15 greenhouse to use for the 2006 growing season. So I was going to make my wife happy and start our seeds outside of the house. It has glass panels on the side and polycarbonate on the roof, a couple windows, a roof vent, and a fan. With my building and mechanical background it shouldn't be too big of a project.

Seeds need a ground temperature around 75 degrees to sprout. You have to be in the 70-80 degree range to get a good germination. With the windows open and the fans going during the warm days I couldn't keep the air temp less than 100 degrees. Then you needed a heater at night. So I ended up cooking and freezing $50 worth of seeds. The good news is it was easy to find Bush Early Girl tomato plants in town.

If you start tomato seeds in a dirt temp of 50-60 degrees, the plants that do come up are short, stocky and usually have a purple tint to them. That's because tomatoes can't take up phosphorus in cold temperatures and a purple tint usually means a phosphorus deficiency. These seedlings are OK, but they will be a little slower in growing. They get to ride in the short yellow bus.

When the ground temp for your tomato seeds is closer to 85 degrees, you'll get tall lanky plants that are more susceptible to diseases. They get to ride the regular bus, but they're on a first name bases with the school nurse. So that 75 degree temp is the #1 thing to achieve. For #2 don't over water them. Oops! Better get back to talking about the greenhouse.

So it was crazy to think this greenhouse was something to start seeds in. It didn't give me what I needed which was a constant dirt temperature. It does give me a place to hold plants till it's time to plant them in the garden though. If you're looking at doing a greenhouse you need to control the heat and there's a lot of ways to do it. With something as small as mine I need to look at blocking the sun. Like the sun screen tarps to different window tints. I definitely need to educate myself more in that area, but then it got to the point, is a greenhouse the way to go for me?

Since ground temperature is every thing and my fencing blocks some of the wind, it's only logical to look at running some solar hot water lines under the tomato plants. I use to do some solar work down in Denver and just happen to have a couple of panels lying around doing nothing. So my next experiment looks like we'll head in that direction, hopefully this spring.

As for the greenhouse don't worry. It works just perfectly for a 300 gallon plastic tank that holds minnows for ice fishing season. It heats up real nice during the day and holds the heat over night. Make sure you buy a seining permit from Wyoming Game and Fish before you tell your wife you're going to build a greenhouse.

October 2006:

Bill Simpson gardens northwest of Casper. Bill is the gardener that first introduced me to the benefits of Determinate Tomatoes. He fences enclosures to ward off the wind. Here are photos taken in the 2006 season of his 'new' front plot. The fencing material is expanded (perforated) metal.

		Before: This photo was taken by Bill Simpson on June 9, 2006. Note how you can actually see through the fencing material. Yet it is adequate to break up the wind.
		After: This photo of the same plot was taken by Bill Simpson on August 29, 2006, some 81 days later. Note Bill's use of concrete blocks as heat reservoirs. They catch heat of the day and radiate that heat back to the plants at night.

Late November 2005, another note from Bill:

		Bill Simpson discovered a new use for tires in the 2005 season. From the 2004 photos below, you can see that Bill has been using concrete blocks for windbreaks and night heat radiation for his plants. This year he tried tires. Like us, he cuts his tires with a little lip left over for strength. This method of cutting, as Bill points out, allows one to avoid the steel belts under the tread and retains a lot of the strength of the tire. ...At this point we would fill the tire with dirt and use it as a raised bed. But Bill inverts his tires!
		Bill explains: "We then set the CUT SIDE DOWN on the soil and put a small amount of dirt around the outside edge. The tires help block some of the wind on young plants, keeps out some of the crawling insects, absorbs solar heat in the day, and helps hold it in at night. Plus, I think alot of the insects don't like the smell of tires." That's right, even if you have ants in your driveway, you never see many on the tires of your car.

Bill's circumstances are different than ours. He has lots of space and can use that space to give a tire to each tomato or broccoli plant. He also has more wind than we have, and the tire help there. Tires obviously work better than his concrete blocks. They trap hot air around the plants during the day and early evening. At night, their shape radiates heat to any part of the plants that overhangs the tires. I think Bill Simpson is onto a new and effective use for tires!

November 2005, a note from Bill:

Bill is praising his Papaya Pear Squash he grew in 2005. He says they sold well at the Farmer's Market. The squash are very firm and nearly impossible to overcook. The plants are nice and big and need space. The main stalk/vine grows to six feet. The fruit are the size of a grapefruit. Bill reports that Papaya Pear easily outproduced all other squash in a cool season. Bill did some planting in tires this year and likes them. he promises to send more news about that later.

..............

January 2005

I don't know if you can remember our lay out. You saw it when you came out last summer when you came out to look at the Bush Early Girl tomato plants. Since we don't spray for bugs, we get hit good and hard by diseases. I am going to have to rethink that. I recently ran across my plant companionship chart and had the light bulb finally come on. You're suppose to keep POTATOES away from - apples, tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers, and raspberries. If they had bell peppers on that list I could have batted 1000.

In reading up on this, this is what I came up with. Potatoes get diseases like Chugwater goes through wind socks, and late blight is usually first on the list. The worst thing you can do is have potatoes by apple trees. That late blight turns into fire blight on them. If you remember, we have 5 apple trees on our east end close to the road. You remember, right next to the raspberry patch! The Winesapp, McIntosh, and Yellow Delicious did fairly well, but the 2 Sweet Sixteen trees just got hammered with fire blight. This was a new problem for us last year, and figured it had to affect the new potato patch 200 ft down wind. In reading up on this, 2 miles wouldn't have been far enough apart.

Well, the next bad plant to have by potatoes is , of course, TOMATOES. We had a good assortment of problems on our tomatoes. The only good thing is the diseases showed up later in the growing season which hit the garden plants worse than the fruits. I guess that's why they call it Late blight. Wow, I'm getting smart. So after reading up on potatoes I don't know if I'll even be planting them next year?

..............

Bill Simpson gardens a few miles west of the City of Casper. His soil is sandy. His place is more exposed to the elements than most gardens in Casper. To compensate for that he has laid his garden out in cells or areas, each cell is surrounded by a four foot fence to break up the wind.