 Well welcome to our webinar for today. My name is Julie Garden Robinson and I'm very happy to host another series of webinars again this year. Next week we will be featuring Esther McGinnis. She is an associate professor and NDSU extension horticulturalist and then you'll hear from me on March 4th. I'm a food and nutrition specialist and I'll be talking about some of the old and new ways to preserve and also prepare vegetables. Next slide. We've already been practicing a little bit so if you're watching live you'll be able to text in some questions in the chat box and at the end of the session I will pose those questions to Tom. I do have a short online survey. This whole project is made possible through a grant from the US Department of Ag and also through North Dakota Department of Ag. So I do ask that you just take a couple minutes to do the short online survey. It will be emailed to you shortly after today's webinar and also be sure to sign up for the opportunity to win a prize and I have the prizes in my office and you'll want these prizes so please fill out the survey. And now we are ready for Tom to tell us about growing tomatoes in North Dakota. But before he starts I'd like to tell you a couple things about Tom. Tom Cald is an extension horticulturalist with NDSU Extension. Tom was raised on a farm in Minnesota where his family managed a commercial apple orchard and 15 acres of vegetables and berries. Tom coordinates the North Dakota home garden variety trials and the state's junior master gardener program. He's also the author of the NDSU yard and garden report which is a popular newsletter for gardeners in North Dakota. With that thank you so much for providing a webinar again this year Tom. Okay Julia it's my pleasure and you always have my full support if there's anything I can do to help the cause just let me know. And I want to welcome everybody out there too. Thanks for being here today. We're gonna talk about the most popular vegetable that we grow here in North Dakota and that are tomatoes. Why do we grow tomatoes? Also called love apples because they're so beautiful because we grow tomatoes because they are irresistible. They're irresistible off the vine. We can use them in delicious pizza and pasta and I also I love grilled cherry tomatoes in the garden just out there popping a few tomatoes in my mouth and enjoying the nature's goodness. We're gonna talk about growing tomatoes from seed to the harvest and we're just gonna just over we don't have time to cover everything in depth but we'll cover everything a little bit and also of course I welcome your questions. I like informal talks as much as possible and I you know any questions that you have are just great. So let's start with first of all soon if you haven't already got to start ordering your tomato seed if you want to start your seeds and I know you had a talk a couple weeks ago from Randy Nelson about how to start your seed successfully and so I recommend you refer to Randy's talk if you want the details about how to be successful growing seeds but when I look for tomato varieties I look for varieties that are early and that's because North Cortes growing season is so short and we have one of the shortest growing seasons in America and it seems like just by the time the tomatoes really start coming we start worrying about Jack Frost so I look for the earliest varieties I can find I want a variety that's gonna give me lots of tomatoes and I want a variety that will resist diseases naturally I don't want to be spraying toxic fungicides in my garden if it's not necessary and so look for the disease resistant varieties and of course you got to pick something that's flavorful otherwise what's the point huh? There we go and there's all kinds of tomatoes there's the standard sometimes called fresh market tomatoes there's canning tomatoes like this Roma and there's a lots of types of cherry tomatoes and here's one yellow pear I know as everybody ever grown yellow pear it's it's one of the mildest tasting ones out there one of the sweetest tomatoes out there it's an old heirloom and a yellow pear tomato just grows like a shrub in the garden it's just loaded with these delicious fruits and there's even one a yellow pear from Fargo that was developed that has a bigger sized fruit so you can look for that the Fargo yellow pear let's there's hundreds of varieties of tomatoes because they are so popular and there's lots of heirlooms out there let's just talk for a second about heirlooms in general I'm not a big fan of heirlooms and that's because I believe you know we've made progress over the last century you know like I didn't come to work today in a horse and buggy I took a car we made progress and similar with tomato varieties we've made progress and you know heirlooms some of their shortcomings is that they're less reliable in their production they're more susceptible to diseases they're generally less productive than today's modern varieties their thin skin and more susceptible to cracking than today's modern varieties but on the other hand you got to realize that in the past there was a I think there was a greater emphasis on flavor and less emphasis on reliability and yields and so there's a lot of heirlooms that have remarkable flavors and so I always put in a couple heirlooms in my garden every year and I come in with low expectations that I may not get a great yield but on the other hand you know the few tomatoes that I will get I'll treasure and I'm just gonna maybe I should shut off the video so we don't get disrupted here excuse me one second here there we go and maybe if June could turn off her video that'd be great too if you could turn it off June it we're just gonna okay great thank you okay let's move ahead one thing about heirlooms is that they are a lot of them are indeterminate types there are determinate and indeterminate types in general so that's one consideration when you select a variety determinate types are generally easier to grow the their vine growth stops when the flowers of the vine appear and so the plants stay compact you don't have to prune determinate types and the trellis scene is optional another thing about determinants is generally they're earlier which again is a big plus in North Dakota and they'll give us a concentrated yield on the other hand indeterminate types have a vine growth that never stops that's until the plant dies and but they have to be pruned and trellis the one benefit about an indeterminate type is they have a long harvest season so like hey if I lived in Florida I would like an indeterminate variety to to get that long harvest but I live in North Dakota where I appreciate any harvest and especially an early harvest so both are fine but determinate ones have advantages here's some of the most popular varieties in North Dakota in our trials I'll just go over them briefly here and early girl people like that because it's early and it is productive it's it have I have an eye after that indicating it's an indeterminate variety but it's not that vigorous celebrity I think it's the most reliable and widely adapted tomato so I always put in some celebrity has excellent resistance to diseases in general Mount fresh plus is a very popular tomato it tolerates cool temperatures it's one of the most popular among commercial growers in the Midwest has nice eight ounce to even 16 ounce fruits and it's very productive and easy to grow if you like a meaty tomato a beef steak then big beef is a relatively modern variety that that's very reliable and delicious Roman's a popular canning variety and among cherries I think super sweet 100 is the most popular because it has amazing productivity but on the other hand one drawback about super sweet 100s and cherry tomatoes in general is that they crack easily and so in our trials we found other varieties that are less susceptible to cracking that would include Juliet this a a s winner the all-america selections winner and I invite you to try that one it's absolutely delicious and less susceptible to cracking and then I just have to throw in my personal favorite are the golden cherry tomatoes and sun gold and sun sugar if you've never tried them I really invite you to put in a vine of them this year you will just be absolutely delighted as the the sweetness and the firmness of the fruits are truly outstanding and maybe you know at the end of the talk like if we if we have some time to chat if anybody has a variety that they recommend I and want to share with the group I always like to get new ideas from other gardeners there are some other tomatoes that we can buy and there I think some are kind of gimmicky one is to catch up and fry Tom Tatl which is you know tomatoes and potatoes they're in the same family and you can graft a tomato vine onto a potato vine and on one vine then you can have you can produce potatoes and tomatoes and so they say this is really good for us a very small garden but my experience is a lot of these gimmicks are there's no particularly there's no synergy between these two plants and usually you just get a poor crop of both and likewise with these topsy turvy tomatoes these ones that grow upside down you see a lot of commercials on them you'll be seeing in about a month you'll start seeing these TV commercials a lot about these types of tomatoes it it's just a gimmick and I've never seen a real successful topsy turvy tomato because I think the biggest reason is the container itself is so small a tomato root system is one of the most extensive of all vegetables and it really struggles in such a small container and it's it's hard to keep uniform moisture in this container and that makes this tomato especially sensitive to blossom and rot so just it's for fun but you have some low expectations with these guys so Tom I'm gonna pop in because we have a pertinent question here would grafting the potatoes and tomatoes affect the pH of the tomato fruit I doubt it I don't think you would have the same pH as the tomato itself originally I don't think there'd be an appreciable change usually grafting has very minor changes on the quality of the fruit itself but I've I've never heard about pH and I know that's a factor for canning Julie but sometimes you see up the graph you can see you can select special graphs that slightly modify the sweetness or improve the vigor of the plant but I've never heard about that about with the potato graft again I think this is just a crazy gimmick question Donna there you go and also actually I can see these questions too here and yes we will be passing out free tomato seeds at spring fever again so stay tuned for that okay let's keep going I can just here we go okay indeterminate types have to be pruned and I think a lot of people get a little bit scared about like they don't know what to prune so I'll just keep it really simple and this this diagram shows it all quite concisely now we start with the tomato vine the stem the main stem and then at the base of every tomato leaf comes a new vine we call it a sucker that's at the at the base of every tomato leaf and you see like this actually this tomato leaf at the bottom is composed it's one leaf there with five leaflets but at the base there you'll see a sucker and usually if you're gonna prune an indeterminate tomato you choose to have either only one vine which you would prune off every sucker and you have to do this on a regular basis through the summer or many gardeners like to use the two vine method so then we have to choose one of the suckers to be the secondary vine and so what I do is I look at the first flower cluster towards the bottom of the vine the main vine and it's surprising but you'll really see on a consistent basis below that first flower cluster you will see a vigorous sucker a thick sucker and you can leave that particular sucker to be your second vine but then also we want to trim off all the suckers above that and also all the suckers below that in pruning and also as a way to limit diseases and diseases come from the soil we like to trim off the leaves that come in contact with the soil so the lower leaves we often trim off because they don't really do much good after a while because they get shaded and they just become a magnet to soil diseases okay as far as fertilizing tomatoes or just a couple important points one is first of all the first point is in general people look let me just draw out a couple things one is if you really want to know what's a best way to fertilize your garden get a soil test and and yes you provide the soil test services for you you can go online at the soil testing lab and you can you can get your soil test in your garden it's like $18 it could be a great investment because actually most people over fertilize but just in general the general recommendation of vegetable gardens in the early spring is to start off with about one pound of 10 10 10 for every 100 square feet of garden and the second number the phosphate is particularly critical in seedling growth but then after that I'd ask you to refrain from fertilizing because especially if you put too much nitrogen in the soil you're going to get a lot of leafy growth and tomatoes can get very vigorous in their leaves and this will take away from their fruit production so I wait to side dress until after I see the first fruit set because I want the plant to be I want it to be triggered to go into its reproductive stage and so we don't want to put on too much nitrogen in the beginning wait till after that fruit set and then's the time to side dress and just slightly you know maybe just a tablespoon tablespoon and a half around the base of the plant but it's important to this is the art of gardening is to keep your eyes on your plants you know if you see your plants have are pale that means they need a little bit of fertilizer on the other hand if it's lush green vines without flowers you're giving your plants too much fertilizer but I often get the question like what's the best fertilizer for my garden and I really think the best thing you can give your garden is this and that is your shadow give your shadow to your garden and these are the best gardeners spend time in their garden they get their shadow to their plants and I know there's a saying among Native American tribes that the best thing to give your land is your footprint you know give your attention to your garden because when you're out there in the garden you'll see what's going on oh my gosh you are looking pale I think you need a little bit of fertilizer or oh my gosh I see a few aphids there let me wash them off before it becomes a problem so so let's give your shadow to your garden and also just another reminder let's all keep our microphones off people okay next thing to talk about because after fertilizing is mulching and mulching can be especially important tomatoes for several reasons but especially because it can accelerate the growth rate we can get our earlier harvest because we can mulch to generate heat in the garden and tomatoes love the heat mulching can also protect plants from soil diseases again most of the diseases on tomatoes start from the soil and work their way up the plant so if we put mulching between the soil and the plant this can serve as a barrier protecting our plants from diseases mulching can conserve moisture and that's very important in our state we live in a semi-arid state and moisture is the most limiting factor in most people's vegetable crops so mulch can help conserve moisture and there are some mulches that will repel insects I know this these are some cucumbers here and I saw this at a planting in Fargo and I just had to take a picture of it you saw a clear plastic malt on this cucumber planting right next to a plant that isn't mulled and can you just see how the heat generated from the clear plastic mulch has moved those plants along they're 10 to 14 days ahead of the cucumbers with all mulching and otherwise all the other conditions are the same here's a picture of black plastic mulching on peppers and black plastic mulching is the most common type of multi-news and vegetable crops but if you want to get the heat benefit from black plastic mulching you have to have the black plastic touching the soil so you have to put it on taut so that the heat that's absorbed by the black plastic can be transferred to the soil the color of the mulching can make a difference and it's kind of interesting that tomatoes especially respond well to red plastic mulching you can get a 20% yield increase by using red plastic mulching because the the light that's reflected off the red plastic stimulates photosynthesis in tomatoes so again to maximize yields consider red plastic mulching here's a summary of some of the benefits of different types of mulching the red plastic gives us our highest yields the clear plastic generates the most heat but weeds will grow underneath the mulch and that can be an issue black plastic will generate heat and it will also prevent weeds underneath from growing so that's very commonly used silver mulching is used in many places across the USA but not so much in North Dakota silver mulching will provide a minimal amount of heat a little bit it reflects the sunlight and that helps plant growth but an interesting thing about silver mulch it it controls insects especially aphids and that's because it reflects the Sun and so what happens is that as an aphid approaches the tomato vine it looks down and it's it sees the sky reflecting so it goes it looks up it sees the sky it looks down and sees this guy and then the aphid just gets confused and has does a crash landing into the mulch and it dies it's it's it does have some impact strong mulching is used in tomato planting but I want to caution us that strong mulching will moderate the heat of summer but we want to get what our ground warm up so don't put the strong mulch on right away wait till we're into summer and the soil has already warmed up landscape fabric can be used in in tomato plantings and the benefit of that is it's reusable and there are special landscape fabrics being developed now with little needle holes created that allow for some water to pass through so look for those types of weed barriers the next thing to talk about is trellising it's important to get your tomatoes off the ground and there's the benefits is you'll have better air circulation in the planting this will lead to fewer diseases will get those vines off that disease infected soil and we'll have better fruit quality because the fruit won't rot in the ground the negatives to trellising is it costs money also because the plants are are off the ground and the soil is exposed you're going to have to pay more attention to irrigation if you trellis your plants and because it's going to be some inconsistent seas and soil moisture you're going to get a greater risk of blossom and rot here's an example of a very common way to trellis tomatoes and that is a bamboo steak that you just pound into the ground pound it a couple feet in the ground and then this will work with compact types and also an indeterminate type if you limit it to one vine so the classic bamboo steak is very commonly used some gardeners especially in the greenhouse they will use string and what they do is you have a horizontal support often a wire that's about eight foot off the ground that it goes above the row and then from that wire you drop a string and then you just then at the end of the string you attach it to the base of the tomato vine and then you just wind the tomato vine around the string as it grows and grows through the year so you got to have that horse like just like a pole beans you know you have to have a like a wire about eight feet up going down the row here's a very popular system that I don't see too much of here in our state but it's used elsewhere especially in commercial plantings is the string weave system in which you pound a steak between every two tomato vines and then you wind a string around the planting and here's an actual view of it you can see that that you have like a sturdy twine or a thick string and you just it goes wrong either side of the tomato planting and you put up a new support string about every eight inches up the plant and you just you end up trading you have about four strings going up the whole way by the end of the year and you'll have like a wall of tomatoes it and you see the benefits it gets all the tomato vine off the off the ground that's the string weave system cages are popular in home gardens and I would encourage you to make your own cages and make them sturdy use that concrete reinforcing mesh and there's some information about how you can the details about how to do it one nice that a couple things like one it's it can be valuable to support the cage with the steak because it's very windy in our plantings and also you can wrap a plastic sheet around the cage to again generate some heat to get our plants off to a strong start there's an old cage it's been through many summers produce a lot of tomatoes for that gardener there's been studies that are trying to indicate which is the best way to go with trellising and each one has its advantages like the string we system or the string system or this is similar to the staking system because the plant is so upright and the ground has an opportunity to warm up quicker the a string system will give you early tomatoes and also you'll have a good individual fruit size but as far as marketable yield the caging will lead to a higher marketable yield but as far as fruit quality the whole they're all the string the cage or the string we system will all give you outstanding fruit quality and letting the tomato vine sprawl it's just you get so many tomatoes will rot and so that's that gets the lowest rating and lastly what's most affordable doing nothing just let the tomato vines sprawl so you can kind of just see that each of the systems has its advantages and disadvantages okay let's move on to pest control and I saw this at a community garden here in Bismarck and man it just totally broke my heart I you know I don't tomatoes one nice thing about you know much of the tomato vine I think just about everything except for the fruit itself is toxic and generally a lot of a lot of we really have insect problems with tomatoes and so really have to advise you that you don't need to use preventative insecticides on tomatoes because again we rarely have a problem with tomatoes so like the person put the seven dust in here it's just rarely a problem with tomatoes so don't do that the number one past that I've seen as far as insects go is the tomato horn worm and this is a giant caterpillar it can get off at least four inches long it's called a garden glutton because it can it has an amazing appetite it can eat four times its weight every day so just imagine that was that was the average person 150 pounds that's like eating 600 pounds of food every day that is what I call that's a major appetite so what would that be like if you're like a hundred a 150 pound person and let's say you had a Big Mac attack you wouldn't go to McDonald's for a Big Mac or two Big Macs if you had the appetite of a horn worm you would have 600 Big Macs you would have 600 large fries to go with it and because you believe in a balanced diet you would have a hundred side salads to go with that and a sweet tooth okay a hundred ice cream cones and because we have a special love for tomatoes you can have a thousand packets of ketchup to go with this every day so the appetite of this horn worm it's it's like into its growth rate in a month is similar to a cat becoming the size of an elephant in one month amazing and so if you do get in if you do get horn worms in your planting you will see a difference I've seen I've seen a third of a vine a third of an entire plant eaten overnight and but the nice thing about horn worms is they're they're really easy to control I just actually you can once you want to see what the heck happened to my vine and then you see that guy just staring at you all you gotta do is pick it off and I just step on it put it my old size 12 foot on it and that's the end of it but there are other tools if that's too gory for you there are natural insecticides that we got we got available for you and that this is a nice a nice trend and guarding now is the natural insecticides are less toxic to people and out of shorter life in the environment and we can go over some of these briefly the BT the bacillus d'angiensis is the most popular natural insecticide it's a natural bacterium and it causes it will cause a horn worm or a caterpillar to get it destroys the gut the stomach of the caterpillar and it will die after two days so like a slow death spinosad is a relatively new insecticide it's also it's safe for people and it has it's a nerve poison it causes paralysis but again it takes about a day or two to work neem has been used in gardening for centuries and centuries it has an unusual it when you spray neem on a plant it it has repellent properties if the insects when they're when they're exposed to neem they they lose their appetite and also they don't develop hormonally so they never have children so that's a very slow acting one if you need something with quick action pyrethrin is a nerve agent that acts immediately on an insect and but again has a very short life in the environment just a couple days in the sunlight and they can break down insecticidal soap is another good tool but you have to spray that soap which dries out the past you have to spray the soap on the bug itself some people when they see horn worms or other insects in the garden they they're less they just want revenge and I call them what I call the dirty hairy Clint Eastwood type of guard gardeners yeah make my day what are you doing mess around my patch and so them you use carbryl or a pyrethroid these are nerve agents that kill on contact and you know if you ever use it like like let's say you do it on cabbage moths you spray this spray carbryl or a pyrethroid like seven is one of these products you spray the seven on those those caterpillars and you can watch them drop down off that plant right away and you can see that nerve poison work and you can see them shaken uncontrollably just for a few seconds before they die so it's you know if you like revenge it can be very sweet using these potent insecticides but again it's like a loaded gun you have to use it with caution and fall the label carefully although insects are rare in a tomato planting I think the the fungal diseases are very common and a couple are most common one of septoria leaf spot you see these little like one quarter inch brown to burgundy lesions on the leaves they start it starts from the base and moves its way up the plant very common early blight is another common one and it has larger brown lesions and if you look carefully at the lesions sometimes you can see concentric circles in it that's early blight one of the most common ways this spreads has to do with improper watering you know when you use overhead irrigation and then you get done with you go oh my god this looks so look how sparkling my leaves look wow those it's so beautiful my garden but actually your plants hate it when you do this because you just gave a prime a prime situation for diseases to develop so avoid overhead irrigation because it just promotes diseases on the leaves in general avoid overhead irrigation if you do irrigate irrigate in the morning and then water deeply not frequently okay if you irrigate in the morning the leaves have a chance to dry up before the night comes and then if you water deeply the roots will grow where the water is if your water deep the roots will grow deep so I really think twice a week is all you need to water and mulching can help a lot to conserve moisture for to attack these common fungal diseases look for modern resistant varieties there they're not going to be immune to disease but they will show some resistance some degree of resistance and we're getting better varieties all the time we got ones that are resistant to early blight and late blight today rotate your crops plant your tomatoes and its relatives they all get the same diseases the tomatoes the peppers potatoes eggplant they all get the same diseases so rotate those crops in a different area of the garden the next year so we don't build up that disease in that area of the garden when you plant your tomatoes space out your plants so they get lots of sun and air movement avoid splashing the soil because that's where the diseases start if you want to there are protective fungicides available and for you can use chlorophthalanil which is the most widely available fungicide at a garden center or if your organic copper will do a good job at protecting against infection it won't cure it but it'll prevent it and then cleaning up the garden at the end of the year can help just a couple other things to wind up our talk here today about one is to talk about blossom and rocks this is by far the number one problem that attacks us as tomato gardeners and you see that hard-grown rot on the bottom of the fruit blossom and rot is caused by a calcium deficiency but the calcium is likely abundant in the soil the problem is the calcium is not getting to the fruits and so we have to do whatever we can to help the calcium in the soil to get to the fruits and one way is to be careful when you cultivate so you don't hurt the root system of the plant because we need those roots to obtain it to mine out the calcium from the soil so be careful when you cultivate don't damage roots also try to maintain soil moisture a uniform amount in the in the soil because that way the calcium can be in the soil solution and taken up by the roots the emulsion can help to maintain good soil moisture we want to avoid too much nitrogen because leaves actively fight the fruits for the calcium so we don't want to have too much of a leafy plant and especially ammonia nitrogen and I'd be like 10 10 10 or ammonium nitrate which are very common sources of nitrogen lead to flushes of leaf growth that can lead to more blossom at problems calcium nitrate nitrate would be a better solution and if you want to there are sprays you can you can use you can spray calcium nitrate onto the fruits not necessarily the plants if you spray the fruits directly when they're young that way we can help get more calcium to the planting my personal experience is usually the first flush of fruits suffers the most but then afterwards after the first flush of fruits the root system is more expansive it can get the calcium the plant needs the fruits need and also the there's less of a flush of leaf growth robbing the fruits from their from their calcium so sometimes a little patience can help last thing to talk about is the second most problem that comes across my desk with tomatoes and that is herbicide injury and you see this this curling up at the least that's definitely herbicide injury please only spray for dandelions or weeds when it's absolutely necessary and when you have most impact controlling weeds in your lawn in the fall actually after a light frost when your tomato vines maybe already dead from the frost but in the fall is when the plants when the weeds when you spray a weed it will naturally absorb that chemical and bring it down into its roots as it gets in because everything in a in a weed flows downward as winter approaches as the weed starts to store food for for winter so spray your dandelions in the fall for more impact and then but sometimes we'll say I swear I didn't spray anything and I still got the tomato problem then the set another emerging source of herbicides is manure and that's because of the type of herbicides we use today in pastures and on grasslands are these herbicides are persistent if you spray a pasture with the herbicide to control weeds and then an animal like this horse grazes on that grass that was sprayed with the with the herbicide herbicide goes right from the mouth of the horse or the cow and it goes through the entire body through the entire digestive tract without being stimulated by the animal it goes from one end and it goes out the other right into the manure and so people who apply manure in these situations what are also applying a persistent herbicide to their garden and tomatoes and potatoes are the most sensitive plants and this herbicide can persist in a garden for a few years so if possible be aware of where your manure comes from and if it's from feeding materials that contain herbicide be very cautious so with that I want to leave on a positive note wish you a great tomato crop this year and I'm be happy to open it up to any questions or comments people have and you have a couple questions okay Jennifer says how do you recommend pruning tomatoes should you sanitize the tool between plants okay there's no need to sanitize your tools between plants and actually for suckers a lot of people just use their their thumb and forefinger but if you want to you can use a bypass pruners you don't have to sterilize between cuts because hopefully there's not diseases in your planting yet and we talked about how to prune in that or in that original thing is first to decide how many vines I'm gonna have am I gonna have one vine or two vines and then I'm gonna take out the suckers using that approach if I have a two vine approach I'll leave the sucker that's just beneath the first flower cluster I'll prune all the leaves below that you know like let's say at least eight inches from the soil so I don't want leaves touching the soil and just keep my eyes on taking out the suckers you don't want to go too aggressive in pruning because if the tomato fruits are too exposed to the sunlight they'll get scalded and if you have a determined Friday you really don't have to do any taking out the suckers just take out some of the lower leaves all right and you have another question from Diane what are your thoughts on using eggshells banana peels and coffee grounds or bone meal okay a lot of what you said is well they're all good you know there's sources of banana peels coffee grounds and eggshells are all sources of organic matter and they can enrich the soil but as far as like some people think eggshells will be a good source of calcium in the soil to fight blossom and rot but eggshells again we already have enough calcium in the soil and also the eggshells have to be an extremely fine powder form to be taken up by the roots that year so I like the idea of using any type of compost or organic matter in the garden but it has its limitations bone meal can be read the label carefully look at look to see actually what's in that bone meal what we're finding out nowadays is the way bone meal is processed today it doesn't have as much it's not a rich source of phosphate as it was in the past but it can be a can be it can add to the fertility of the soil other good sources of organic fertilizer cotton seed meal would be a good one or another one mellorganite can be useful in a garden situation fishy mulch and can be a decent source of nitrogen as well good question and then I put a note in this is Julie garden Robinson and I keep our food preservation materials up to date I just want to remind everybody that we do recommend acidifying all tomato varieties before you can them and you can use citric acid or lemon juice so we have all that information on our website you don't have to acidify if you're going to freeze the tomatoes so check out all those resources and then we have a comment from Andrew do you know of a good replacement tomato for Flora America I can't get it anymore okay if I wanted if I first of all before I'd give up I would I think you could I think if you're aggressive you could find it and what I would do to find of course you know Google's magic these days you can just Google for America there's a lot of heirloom tomato companies out there and you might you might be able to find a source of them I would look for the catalog from totally tomatoes has over 200 tomato varieties there's Baker Creek these from America's heirlooms I look for Baker Creek seed savers exchange if you really want to grasp be aggressive there's a network you could contact seed savers exchange they have a network of seed savers and they in the past you've offered 13,000 different varieties of vegetables so I wouldn't give up on that yet if you really if you live for Flora America and if you want to Andrew if you want to send me an email I can also search for you and find something I try to find that Flora America for you because I've heard of that too it's not it's not an ancient variety but otherwise again I would give you a Flora America is a fresh market variety and so I would give you I think celebrity would be comparable or that Mountain Fresh Plus would be comparable to a Flora America and Jennifer I think as a question for me because I talked about acidifying with lemon juice etc for vinegar it's okay to use vinegar in say salsa formulations that have been developed using vinegar but it probably would lend a more pickle-like taste to to tomatoes so we do recommend the lemon juice and the citric acid okay any other questions out there well thank you Tom this was very interesting great anytime and if anybody has any questions you know be just send me an email I'll be happy to help you good luck with your garden this year everybody happy spring