Update on Growing Desert Perennial Tomatoes and Peppers: Summer Is Coming Again I read somewhere that tomatoes stop growing when the soil reaches a temperature of 90 degrees. It is nowhere near that yet here near Palm Springs, California. The outside temperature hardly gets to 90 most days, and then for only a few hours at the most. The weather has been divine as far as temperature, but howling winds were driving me crazy after about four straight days. Weekends have been like that for a month. Today it is calm and truly heavenly. Therefore, I sang in the garden longer than usual and pulled two little weeds. Most of the tomato vines had pieces growing out into the walkway, so I had about 20 strands to tie up to my recycled supports. The bird cages I put out there a month or so ago are now completely covered in vines, flowers and tomatoes. What a beautiful sight! And the smell! Suddenly it struck me that the side that gets afternoon sun is stunted compared to the side that gets morning sun. It's a shocking difference. The two rows are less than eight feet apart and both sheltered from the wind by being between two houses, but the poor little plants on the east side are getting cooked in the afternoons. The ones on the west are about five feet high on average and totally lush whereas those on the east are not four feet high and puny. They have lots of tomatoes and flowers on them, but they don't look happy. We're trying to figure out what kind of shade to try. Several tomatoes fell on the ground before I noticed they were ripe so I squashed them up in my hands and planted their seeds on top that way, the same way I did last summer to start the tomatoes in the first place. I don't know whether it will work, since with all the mulching we've done this year the soaker hoses are now completely below the surface of the soil. When I "planted" tomato seeds last year by squashing a box of many varieties of overripe tomatoes from produce store and farmers' market dumpsters, the soaker hoses were on the surface with the seeds. Of course I don't know what happened while we were gone that first two weeks and the temperature was 110 in nonexistent shade, but somehow tomato seedlings were all along the soaker hoses when we got back from vacation and our granddaughter's national AAU basketball tournament in New Orleans. So I'll just see if any new seedlings grow. We've eaten fresh, wonderful, perfectly juicy but not watery tomatoes every single day since January. Since I planted so many different kinds, we've had beefsteak, Early Girl, Early Boy, generic salad, cherry and grape tomatoes, besides Roma tomatoes and others I can't identify. Now there is a pear-shaped red bunch growing that look like ones I planted from expensive seeds in Santa Monica, but I didn't have any tomatoes like that when I squashed the tomatoes last year. Maybe this is some "not true to form" result of hybridization. I can't wait to try those. Every kind we have had have all been so good. I scraped seeds out on a newspaper between the pages when we first started eating them, and now I have about 200 dried seeds. I don't think I need them all, but we'll see if the vines die after all, the way tomatoes always did every other time I planted them and babied them. If the plants really are perennial or naturalize, I'll have seeds to trade for lots of other things. The peppers are all still going crazy too. All different kinds, planted basically the same lazy way the tomatoes were, but in the case of peppers we ate them and threw the seeds around afterwards rather than throwing the whole fruit on the soil surface the way I did the tomatoes. Hot peppers seem to grow easier than bell peppers, but we don't need as many as we have of either kind. I'll see what happens to those plants in the summer sun and then I'll know whether we have to plant them every year here or not. What a great life growing—and eating--naturalizing vegetables in the desert! - 30 -