Cool! Which garden are the Douglahs in?
I'm excited that you're growing Aji Limon—I'm betting yours will be off the chart! One little thing I would have done differently last year, however, with the Limon: By the end of the season when the plants were getting large and loaded down with fruit, they became an unmanageable, tangled mass of skinny branches, unable to adequately support the fruit load, even with some elaborate staking and support twine...I believe the next time I grow Aji Limon (or Guyana or any of the "sprawling" baccatums) I would put them in tomato cages while they were still small...
Just a thought...You may have a better idea than that.
Here's a pik of the mess my Limon row had become by the middle of November. You can't really see it in the photo, but despite all the staking and tying-up, many of the fruit-laden branches were laying on the ground:
Are you getting more than 1 good harvest out of your maters? I seem to get 1 good one, and after that the spots appear..production drops way down.It may just be July-August temps that do that, as I'm guessing that they start having reduced flower production when the night time temps go up in the 90's(like peppers).
I hope you don't mind my butting in GS, but I can't help but want to help out another Louisiana grower...For a while every year I would lose my tomato crop around the middle of summer—The vines would wilt like they needed watering, but I couldn't water them enough to stop the wilting, and they would eventually just "burn up," as the tomato growers like to say. I finally discovered that I had the Southern Root Knot Nematode in my garden. You can actually pull up the plants after they are dead and see knots in the roots, sort of like arthritic fingers.
The solution for the nematodes, and a thing that also helped my chile plants grow way better, was to begin using shredded hardwood, mixed into the soil and as a thick mulch layer on top of the rows. It turns out there are polyphenols in the branch bark that nematodes can't tolerate, but the nematode prevention was only a side benefit of all the wonderful things that hardwood chips do for the soil.
I now get good tomato production up until the first freeze, around Thanksgiving, or even early December.
I have more info if you're interested. Good luck with your 2012 Grow!
Gary
