Bobby, thanks for the kind words. I have had a long and somewhat frustrating experience with fusarium in my garden. Some years it is worse than others and it looks like this year will be one of the fairly bad ones. A couple of years ago every plant but one of my March plant out died within 6 weeks but I had the best luck I have ever had with tomatoes put out in June. I try to keep many replacement plants ready to go so that I am constantly replanting and I am sometimes very pleasantly surprised by the replacement plants doing great. I will be replacing around a half dozen or so this week. I find it much easier to just replace a sick plant than to vainly try to keep it alive and that is how I discovered that you can grow tomatoes all summer down here. I rarely have more than a couple of weeks from late May til late December when I am not picking a few fresh tomatoes. Some of the tomatoes that die will be replaced by peppers because they do so well down here in the fall.
Cuostralee is one of the most susceptible to fusarium and it is one of the few despite numerous attempts that I have never been able to grow. A couple of others that are off my grow list for the same reason are Break O'Day, Momotaro, and Green Zebra. There are a lot more that are very susceptible; but I still grow a few because I can usually get a few fruits off before they get too sick. One that always gets fusarium for me is Prudens Purple yet I seem to always get at least 10 good tomatoes off of it before it succumbs so I still occasionally plant a couple. This year I have set out nearly 100 different varieties with the expectation of only about a quarter of them being very successful. Next year due to health reasons I plant on cutting way back on the number of varieties that I plant and will concentrate more on the heirlooms that have shown themselves to be the best for my garden with only a few new ones. After trying over sixty new varieties last year and even more this year I think I can narrow down my list significantly.
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