Bea

Check the pH of what you are watering with too. Very alkaline tap water in a container locks up magnesium and iron even when both are present, and you can feed forever without fixing it.

The palm rub test is a good one. I aim for the grain being chewy in the centre, not fully soft. Soak time matters more than steam time for that.

Two things worth checking anyway. Did you prune hard recently? Heavy suckering in the same week as a heat spike triggers this reliably for me. And is your drip actually wetting the whole root zone? Twice a week for 40 minutes could be plenty or could be a wet stripe 15cm wide, depending on emitter spacing. Dig down 15cm an hour after a cycle and see how wide the wet band is.

How many plants are in there? Supermarket basil is often 20 seedlings in one pot, and no amount of water keeps that alive in July. If you bought it as a pot rather than growing it, split it into three.

Same, and it also cured me of planting them out two weeks early every year just because the calendar said so.

Give it a stir once a week with a clean spoon so the top of the mash does not dry out and crust. Mine takes six weeks for the flavour to stop tasting like blended raw pepper.

Can confirm, a 10cm desk fan on the lowest setting at the end of the bench transformed my seedlings. It also stopped the algae on the compost surface.

Worth adding for future readers: the first flush of flowers on a young plant is often all male, which panics people. Females follow about a week later.

One more thing to rule out: squash vine borer or a rotting crown will cause fruit drop too, but the plant looks sick within a week. Yours sounds vigorous, so I would not chase that.

Fitting a smaller jar of water on top as a follower keeps everything submerged better than the glass discs, which tend to let a leaf float up round the edge. That floating leaf is usually where the film starts.

This is why I loosen the bottom third of the root ball when planting now. It looks brutal but it cuts the sulk in half in my beds.

Compost is never wasted, so if you truly cannot wait, add it and test in autumn when the lab is not busy and the results will guide next spring. Just do not add blood meal blind, extra nitrogen on a phosphorus problem makes the purple worse.

Legumes fix their own nitrogen so they are the last crop to complain, yes. They are basically a control group you accidentally planted.

Also check whether your milk changed. UHT and some ultra-pasteurised brands ferment very differently and my grains went stringy the month my shop quietly switched supplier.

Plastic, in light colours, and go bigger than you think. On a west balcony at 38C the binding constraint is your once-a-day watering, and fabric pots dry through every surface, which is exactly wrong for your situation. The air pruning benefit is real but it matters most for plants staying in the pot for years, not for a tomato that lives five months. If you buy plastic, get 40 litres rather than 20 for tomatoes, put them on feet so air moves underneath, and mulch the surface. A large pot is its own thermal buffer.

Measured mine with a probe two years ago out of curiosity: black pot in afternoon sun was 9C warmer at the pot wall than a terracotta-coloured one next to it. Roots really do stop working at the edges in that heat.

So the compost and the fertiliser were both working against me. Would sand help or is that the myth I keep reading about?

Handles, every time. Getting a flat disc out of a pint jar full of brine involves a fork and swearing.

Weights, without much hesitation. Burping is a two second job you can do by hand for free; keeping the cabbage under the brine is the thing that actually decides whether you get kahm and soft edges, and in a pint jar the headspace is small enough that a single floating shred ruins the surface. Airlocks are convenience. Weights are the mechanism.