Ciao hollers,

Purple leaves could mean that it's time to fertilize again. You mentioned that you fertilized once, but not when. If it's been over a month, I'd do it again..tomatoes in containers need to be fed more often than if they're in the ground.

Blossom drop can happen if/when temps reach >85F or 30C. Pollination is thwarted at those temps as well, especially in humid conditions and I believe PA suffers from that as much as we do here in Ontario.

Shaking the cage can help, so can manually "flicking" the blossoms with your fingers, which causes the pollen to fall out of the blossoms. Putting potted bee-attractive flowers near your plants may or may not help as well.

I'd start with a very basic "blue stuff" fertilizer like 10-10-10 and flick the flowers..see if that makes a difference for you. Give it a few weeks and try to be patient. Usually the blossom drop thing doesn't persist. If you get in over-anxious parent mode (not that I've personally had any experience with that myself *eye roll*), you could also vibrate the blossoms with an electric toothbrush and put a fan on the plants. Hey, people do this. Not people with busy lives, mind you, but people do this, LOL.

Buona fortuna,
Julianna

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Holly,

Take solace in the fact that there will always be people more neurotic than you. Some folks, believe it or not, put lawn chairs where they can watch their plants grow. It takes the place of the telly until the NHL can decide whether it wants a season or when the snow flies and you can make your own rink where the plants used to be, LOL. Sorry, Canuckian humour.

Buona fortuna,
Julianna

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Holly,

Cute nickname btw...

Just a little FYI on the fertilizer thing..many people tend to overdo when it comes to fertilizers, which is why I recommended a dilute "benign" 10-10-10 fertilizer. To de-mystify the numbers, in case any of you reading this don't know and want to, the numbers stand for N-P-K, or Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium in chemistry-speak. When you're looking to boost your fruit production, look for a high Phosphorus number, the middle one. Phosphorus is needed at initial transplanting time as well, to help reduce transplanting shock and produce good root systems. That's why a lot of "transplant" fertilizers have a higher middle number. Nitrogen is involved with producing vegetation so this is what you want 2 weeks after transplanting. Finally, Potassium, the 3rd number, is more involved with fruit production and development of sugars. If you pick "ripe" fruit and it's puffy or soft or rots easily, it COULD be a Potassium deficiency, but weather plays its part as well.

The numbers on your miracle grow fertilizer may be a bit out of whack for your problem. I'd still go with the 10-10-10 initially, wait a few weeks, see if things don't improve. If your leaves are still purple and your blossoms are dropping, sounds like you need to boost your Phosphorus, so go with something that's high in the middle number.

Hope that helps,
Julianna

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Holly,

I'd need to know the dimensions and volume of both the earthbox and the "large pots" to know more about why your plants in the former are doing better than the latter. My guess is that the earthboxes are larger and the plants can grow longer without becoming rootbound.

Tomatoes have 2 distinct "growth habits", meaning how big they get in all directions, rambling, compact, dinosaurish, etc:

Determinate: grows to a certain point and then stops..stops producing leaves, stops producing flowers, tends to be "smaller".

Indeterminate: grows until frost kills it or until the grower gets tired of picking fruit or disease gets the best of it.

Having said that, to grow indeterminate tomato plants (the majority of tomato varieties "out there") in containers, you need enough soil so you won't end up with severely rootbound plants. You'll get tomatoes even with rootbound plants, but not as many as you would if they had more room. Ok, so how much is enough? For a large indeterminate tomato, like, say, Brandywine..huge, big, dinosaur, will eat your house..you need 1 cu. ft. of soil or a 15 gallon pot. And a BIG stake..a big one..no, bigger..BIGGER, come on! That's right, 6-8 ft stake. If you live in an area that gets high winds, be prepared to fasten that stake to something that won't blow into Kansas during that wind/thunderstorm/tornado/hurricane.

If you give your plants that much space, you may or may not notice a difference between production of the exact same plant grown in the container vs in the ground, provided they were transplanted at the same time and are given the same amount of sunshine. Food and water will be different between those plants. They have to be. The one in the container has a fixed amount of growing medium and will need more food/water more often.

I hope that helps ;o)

Julianna

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