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By Adrian Higgins
Thursday, July 20, 2000; Page H10

Tomatoes: Last year, the drought squeezed the life out of America's favorite vegetable. This year, excessive rain is taking a different toll. Gardeners are finding the sheer biomass outgrowing the cages. Stems sprawl, strain and collapse. Don't try to untangle the cage from the plant; the stems are easily damaged. One fix is to take three tall, wood stakes and drive them in against the outer rim of the cage. They should stick up above the wire, so the top of the tomato plant can be coralled within the stakes using twine.

Another option is to give the plant a haircut. Top it, says Jon Traunfeld, of the Maryland Home and Garden Information Center. Even if you lose flowers and young fruit now, the plant still will produce a bountiful harvest in its new compact state.

The other more serious problem is leaf yellowing. Lower leaves naturally discolor as they age, but if the discoloration is accompanied by brown spots and lesions, you have a disease named early blight. A lot of gardeners are reporting these symptoms now. Uncontrolled, it can wipe out a tomato plant.

Traunfeld says tomato growers should remove and discard affected leaves and lay a thick mulch because fungal spores on bare soil are kicked up onto the leaves by rainfall and the gardener's hose.

The disease can be controlled by sprays, including a fungicide called Daconil 2787, or organically using a liquid copper spray or fungicidal soap.

Don't compost infected leaves.

Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens may be the country's least-visited national park, but you can correct that. On Saturday, the water garden in Northeast Washington holds its Millennium Festival of the Waterlily. Its ornamental ponds are filled at this time of year with choice varieties of hardy waterlily, an enchanting plant immortalized by Claude Monet in his paintings. But the pools also are blanketed in drifts of lotus plants in resplendent bloom: an experience not to be missed.

The festival includes a puppet theater for children as well as workshops on water gardening and tours of the greenhouse and ponds plus a photography contest (deadline for photo submission is today). Free. 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Intersection of Anacostia and Douglass streets NE just off I-295. Call 202-426-6905.

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