California Gardening: Any chance for (outdoor) winter tomatoes?, 0 by quiltygirl

quiltygirl wrote:
How are your tomatoes doing now? Yesterday I just clipped a sack full of green tomatoes, large and small, that all started growing after the flux of summer heat. I stopped tying them up to the fence supports at the end of summer and now they are even more prolific are a huge bushy mass (all varieties intertwined) crawling all over their pots and several feet along the ground. With low 30's forecast and cool days, I figured they will soon be toast! I also clipped the last of the viable peppers and my funny eggplants and the tomatillos. I heard peppers are the first to turn to mush. Last year, on the Pepper forum, there was talk of overwintering and there was a gal nearby that was successful. Not that they kept producing, but the plants survived the winter to go on to produce again the next spring. I have a friend in Thousand Oaks with ONE tomato plant and it is in a Topsy Turvy hanging thing. She planted it summer of 2010 and it has produced continuously since then. In the winter she moved it from hanging from her patio cover to hanging from a tree further out in the yard. Funny thing is when they moved to T.O. from the South Bay, I used to chide them about how hot and cold it was where they now lived, compared to my comfortable San Pedro (of course they did not wear sweaters for the 4th of July like I did). But now that I live here (not far from Singing Wolf) I see they are more temperate than us.

I will have to soon deal with the cool weather in respect to 2 new citrus planted. I read that the Mandarin and Meyers Lemon are both only rated to 32 degrees. The Lemon is a dwarf and has 2 tiny lemons on it now and the Mandarin was doing great with all sorts of buds even and now it has lost all it's leaves, wonder if it will survive.