One of the benefits of being a garden writer is that breeders send us plants to trial and write about.

This year I received six new cherry tomato plants named “Tomaccio.”  These plants were bred in Israel and are supposed to get 9 feet tall.  I gave a few away (Mitch Olszak doesn’t grow cherry tomatoes, so he didn’t want one) and planted four myself. I made sure I had a ladder high enough so I could harvest these sweet, raisin tomatoes. I had visions of Jack and the Beanstalk.

It’s been two weeks and they haven’t budged.  Water and fertilizer didn’t help. I even put my ladder away, thinking these plants were duds.

On Tuesday, Mark Fisher from Maple Grove Nurseries called and thought I should do an article on global cooling.

It seems people are calling him and asking why their peppers and tomatoes aren’t growing well.  Whenever things don’t grow as expected, customers always blame the greenhouses and 99 percent of the time it isn’t their fault.

The reason my tomatoes and yours aren’t growing well is the weather. Tomatoes and peppers need warm days and nights to grow successfully, and we have been lacking in the warm nights department.

On checking with the Weather Channel, the night temperatures during the first two weeks of June in our area have been in the 40- and 50-degree range. Tomato and pepper plants just don’t perform when the temp is under 55 degrees. Ten out of the first 15 days of June, the temperature has been under 55 degrees at night.

On June 13, the night temp went down to 52 degrees. This might explain why my wife has been freezing during the night.  Behind the blind, I have the window open for fresh air. Don’t tell her.

I have planted more tomatoes than I usually do because of Mr. Olszak’s challenge to me to enter them in the fair. I hope it warms up soon or we may be entering tomato flowers. 

As a test, I planted several tomatoes in last year’s straw bales that have fallen apart. They seem to be coming along better this year.  I did plant them three weeks earlier.

The good news in gardening is, your lettuce, broccoli and cabbage should be doing excellant with these cold nights.

I wouldn’t give up  on your vegetables yet. Even your impatiens may not be doing as well as before, but they will. Mark was just kidding about global cooling.

I have been getting an unusual amount of mail lately on my articles.  Some of them come to the house, while others are sent to The News, where Bob McDowell uses them as a coaster to set his coffee cup on.

I got a charge out of the letter from Don Bumgardner. He was concerned that maybe I got a kickback from writing about Andy Mast’s mixed hanging baskets.  It seems most of his neighbors went there, and Don even went himself. His concern was that I might get kicked out of the Baptist Choir if I did.

I do have a record of being thrown out of choirs.  Sometimes uptight choir directors just don’t share in my sense of humor.