Here’s a shot of all 14 caged positions with sunflowers in bloom.  There are a lot of bees now and it looks like the tomatoes have a lot of flowers.  As mentioned before these sunflowers drink a lot of water and they don’t seem to make for good companion plants.  The habeneros shared with sunflowers are probably not going to produce anything.  Out of 12 habeneros planted I might see 4 plants produce anything.  Next year sunflowers will not be used as companion plants and will have to have their own container.

A sunflower companion plant rises high above the rest of the tomatoes.  Saw an almost red tomato on a Celebrity and it didn’t have BER and it is of decent size.  I’m sure it will be ready to pick tomorrow and it will be the earliest that a decent tomato has been harvested on this roof.  I did use quite a bit of lime in each container.  Overall there are a lot of green tomatoes and so far little evidence of mites.  I did not see any live crawling ones yet but might have seen one of their webs.  Still doing hard water showers every day.  That is something that can’t be done with drip irrigation.

Update 7/27:  Picked first tomato tonight from a Big Boy.  The tomato was around 8oz (decent size) and had a little Blossom End Rot (BER) at the bottom.  Cutting into it revealed the BER went into more than half the tomato.  Although it didn’t look bad from the outside it was bad on the inside.  It didn’t taste that well either.  This is the earliest decent tomato picked since I’ve been growing tomatoes on the main roof (2005).  Usually first picked tomatoes are small and total throwaways.  BER does go away as the plant gets its circulation going so BER should be expected on the first few.  It becomes a problem when it hits every tomato in the first wave of harvest which has happened in past years due to stress on the plants and Mark not completely aware of what is going on.  So far no mites seen.  Some curled leaves but no mites.  Not sure what is going on with them but it doesn’t look like a problem right now.