Thank you for responding, Dewayne mater. Your tomato in your avatar looks delicious! I recruited some help with my ETs as I've had back surgery, but my Dad and I followed Raybo's updated instructions. We did one container at a time and mixed up the lime, bark pieces, and potting mixture (I'm blanking on something, sorry!) and stir it up with the shovel, then fill up the ET, watering in between every few shovelfuls. Oh, the other thing is adding fertilzer, duh! I have most of Raybo's ET stuff saved, and my Dad and I have been using ETs for a few years now. It may be that I need to add more fertilzer at this point. There's ants on the retainer will right behind my ETs and I'm a bit nervous about putting Molasses in them, though I picked up some funnels and figured I could add it to water, I'm still deciding. I have soaker hoses going into a pipe that fills up the bottom fairly well. Ironically, my two paste tomatoes (were labelled incorrectly) don't have any BER!
The Black Plum are doing a bit better, though the Japanese Black Trifele is sometimes BER and sometimes it's like all the liquid dropped to the bottom of the tomato, but it's skin is still closed. I don't know if that's BER or not, but I've started to bring the tomatoes in once they're almost ready to be picked to see if it'll help.
Normally I have more heat problems, but we've stayed in the lower 90's with only a small spurts in the upper 90s and a couple days in the 100s. I have an oak tree that adds shade to the ones on the ends, but the two tomatoes with BER are getting good sun. I can't cover them as they're hanging way over the top of my trellises. I did notice a new hydroponics store not too far away, I just may stop in and see what they have! Thank you for adding your experiences and advice for me.
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