Sounds like there might be something about the soil the roots don't like. Maybe too "clayey"?

Maybe you need more water in this heat

I think that water and correct feeding are most likely my issues. Everything is in a 5'x16'x10" raised bed and I have only been watering wed and sun for about an hour each time. I feed a whole 14lb bag of the Jobe tomato fertilizer through out the season and have just started on a bag of garden-tone and I usually feed the whole garden once every other week or so. Maybe I need a bloom and fruit specific blend because everything is green and growing but the flowers are just blooming then withering away. Speaking of fertilizer had anyone used the Texas tomato food? I saw it the other day and like that it is produced in Freeport. Ill bump the watering to mon, wed, sat and report back on the results.

Until the outdoor temps get cooler, you will have very little luck in setting blooms on tomato plants. It is still to hot during the day and if it is over 90 for most of the night they will be lucky to set. You might verify by looking at temperatures for setting tomatoes on Google. Best of luck to you. Fertilizer will not help as much as lower temperatures, I am afraid.

Mud-Dabber

In this heat not much is going to do much except peppers. I yanked out my spring tomatoes and squash and replanted with new tomato and squash plants. They have barely even grown in the last two weeks. I just keep them watered and alive until it starts to cool down some and then I expect them to take off.

My peppers are producing like crazy. Jalapeno, cayenne, tabasco, banana peppers. All the plants are loaded down with peppers. I have one tabasco plant that I planted in March. It has done nothing but grow the past couple months and has had zero blooms. Once the heat wave set in a few weeks ago it started blooming and setting peppers like crazy. My other tabasco plant has been blooming and producing since like late April and is still producing tons of peppers. Crazy how the same plants can act so different.

hey Derek, aren't you getting a load of porters???...i am with just 1 plant...

this new raised bed gardening is nothing like open ground gardening...next year will be a different story for my design...

I picked a ton. But in the heat they slowed way down and the leaf footers were starting to move in. So instead of babying it I yanked them. I cut off a good twig and cloned it. Planted the twig and let it grow inside to get a good root base. I replanted it about a week ago. Hoping to get a good fall crop of Porters.

i picked a couple dozen Porters today...fixin' to plant these cabbage / broccoli / lettuce next week and some squash / green beans ... musta missed a couple of cups planting seed...bad eye day

Can I finally post on this thread? Not your normal garden but hey for a guy that lives in a small efficiency apartment at least I can garden (though on a micro level). Planted these from seeds 19 days ago. They are growing like crazy. Took a good five days before they even sprouted, but once they started thier first true set of leaves they are just taking off! Soon I�ll have fresh butter crunch lettuce that I grew in August in Texas!

This is the growth from the pic I took last night till today. They are growing like crazy daily!

That looks great Urban. Can you explain more about that setup/growing system?

Honestly I would love to and will...just not tonight. The thing to appreciate about this is you can grow crops year round and the light I am using only burns at 30 watts...less than half a normal 60 watt incondesent build. But it can be easily scaled up while still being low cost energy wise.

Ok, well this is going to be one long write-up. Slow day at work so perfect timing. To start, just a brief history, I do have experience with growing indoors using hydroponics. It was in the early 90�s so it has been some time. I also enjoy regular gardening, however I live in a small apartment now and don�t foresee me getting a regular �yard� again. I was going to set up a fish tank, but once I really thought about cost versus maintenance and such, I figured a mini garden would be a better choice for me. My setup is very small and inexpensive and as such definitely has it�s limitations. But it was cheap to set up (around $75) and if this is something I do want to pursue more, its easy to expand upon.

If you are reading this you probably already garden. Indoor hydroponic gardening is actually two separate things. First is the part of growing indoors under artificial lights. There is nothing wrong with growing indoors under lights with pots and soil�many do just that. Then there is the hydroponics aspect. It can easily been done outdoors and again many do that too. So hydroponics does not automatically mean indoor growing. My setup just happens to be both (hydroponics and indoor growing) because I did not want to mess with dirt and I like the controlled aspect of knowing the nutrients I am adding to the water (plus it�s much cleaner�no knats and such).

So to grow any plant the main things needed are water, nutrients, temperature and light. I�ll start with the water and nutrients. When growing plants with their roots submerged in the water you want a low ph of around 5.5-6.5. I haven�t tested my water but the nutrients I buy claim to adjust basically any water to around 6. Last time I tested mine (when I had aquariums) it was around 7.5. Again not sure because I haven�t tested my water for ph at my apartment. I figured my plants better adapt or find ones that will because I do not want to set up a reverse osmosis filter nor buy bottled water every time I change the water. But so far so good because my plants are currently thriving. Then the nutrients�pretty simple actually. I let the scientist figure that part out for me and just buy premade hydroponic fertilizer. You can�t use regular Miracle Grow or other fertilizers you find at big box stores because they lack the micro nutrients added to hydroponic mixtures. I use General Hydroponics Maxigro and Maxibloom a water soluble dry mix. The thing to remember with nutrients is to feed lightly when the plants are young and it�s always better to under feed than over feed.

So you have the water and nutrients, the temperature is set by what you keep the house at so nothing to cover there�so then is the lighting. This is were a lot of science comes in. And there is two main parts�spectrum and intensity. There has been tons of university based research on how plants react and use light. True full spectrum is sunlight and very difficult to match artificially. Plants use more of the blue (left side of the spectrum) and red (right side of the spectrum) of light and reflect most of the green (middle of the spectrum)� that�s why most plants are green! Then on top of that, plants use more of the blue spectrum in their �vegging� stages and much more of the red in their �bloom� or flowering stages. So many modern grow LED lights you will see advertise as a full veg and bloom lights because they have a lot of blue and red LEDs (makes for a pinkish glow). Then many will add couple of individual LEDs in the UV and inferred parts of the spectrum in addition to some white ones to make them more full spectrumish.

Then there is the intensity of the light. I can get a full spectrum light, but if it is only say 10 watts and does not produce much intensity it won�t grow a full sized plant. So more watts usually means more power, more cost and more energy usage. But it also means you can grow bigger and more light demanding plants. The best thing to measure the intensity of light that a plant actually uses is called PAR-Photosynthetic Active Radiation. As I understand it, it is like rain drops falling from the sky, but these are actually light photons. The higher the PAR the more photons hitting the leaves (like more rain). So light demanding plants like tomatoes or peppers need a lot of PAR whereas plants like lettuce may not need that much. This is where the math and science help. You can actually look up PAR numbers depending on the plant type. So if you have an idea of the plant you want to grow you can look up what is a recommended PAR to grow that plant. Then you can decide on the light you need knowing if it can produce that PAR or greater. As an example; tomatoes may need around 800 PAR whereas lettuce may only need around 300.

Man this is a lot of typing�I hope Derek at least reads this! So last few things�so PAR is an important number to know about your lights. There are PAR meters you can buy but they can be expensive. Many manufactures of lights will give you the PAR ratings of their lights as a chart. Thing to remember the PAR rating decrease dramatically the further away you move from the light source. So like my 45 watt LED (that actually runs at around 35 watts) has a PAR of 320 at 6� from the light but drops to 200 at 12� and 125 at 18�. But again science and math can help me figure out exactly what my plants need. The next number to look at is DIL�and I can�t remember what the full term is I only recall the acronym. But that is a number that calculates the daily needs of PAR for a plant. PAR is in millions per second so we have to do the math to know what light power we need, how far we should hang the lights from our plants (given that light�s PAR rating) and how long we leave the lights on versus off to know we can grow a plant at it�s maximum.

My true life example. I knew I wanted to grow lettuce. I can look up DIL and it says it needs to be around 17 DIL. A tomato is more like 30-50. So my light produces 320 PAR at 6�. There are 3600 seconds in an hour. To help convert it, it is divided by 1 million so I just use .0036. So I leave my lights on 16 hours a day and off 8. So I take the .0036 x 16 hours to get 0.0576. Then I multiply that by my PAR at 6� from the plants (which I have mine set at) which is 320 X 0.0576 equals 18.432 DIL. So the lettuce I am growing needs around 17 DIL and my system is setup at 18.432 which too me is perfect! So no guess work, I know exactly how far my light needs to be from my plants how many hours on per day and the PAR it runs at to know my plants are getting the DIL they need for maximum growth. Pretty simple right?

That was a lot of typing and there are literally thick books are research papers that discuss in much more detail than what I wrote above. In addition there are many types of hydroponic systems one can use (I use the deep water culture method) and the pros and cons of each one. I just wanted to give a somewhat introduction to indoor gardening in hopes to help explain what is involved to help you setup a system that works for what you want to grow. Lights can get expensive, but a better understanding of them and what the plant needs will help you make a better decision if and when you do decide to buy some lights to try indoor gardening.

Few last things�indoor hydroponics is not a replacement of regular gardening. I just think of it is another aspect or expansion of the hobby. It can keep you growing year round and I think it�s a wonderful way to gets kids interested in growing their own food. I also think a setup like mine would be perfect for someone that is less able to grow a large or outdoor garden but still enjoys gardening. Also they say indoor hydroponics can produce 5 times the amount of produce per square foot versus regular gardening. Mainly very controlled growing to maximize growth rates, no loss to pests and you grow year round. So in reality my little 2�x2� garden is the equivalent of a regular 10�x10� garden.

If you have any questions just let me know!

That's by far the longest post I've actually read. I need to read it again. Excellent write up. I am going to look into getting into this.