I'm in zone 5a with almost zero humidity, a mountain-desert region. It's the lack of humidity that does the tomatoes in here. The sun is a real scorcher so I'm still thinking the shade might be good idea. But I've convinced my SO we need to make sure there's plenty of air flow, too. Gardening is, after all, an ever-evolving process.
This reply has a lot of good info, though. I have no idea what tomatoes we got aside from knowing we got some beefy ones, some cherry varieties, and maybe some kind of roma. We have five plants, but I'd say at least three aren't doing very well due to a) having bought them faaaar too early in the season before we could directly plant them, b) transplanting them three days ago, and c) spending the last two days in blazing heat. (Yesterday, 80 degrees outside temp, 90 under the half-open hoop house, and today, 90 degrees outside and a good 100 under the even more open hoop house.) The heat is supposed to break and get back into normal seasonal ranges (50 at night, 60-70 during the day) over the next week, so hopefully we'll be able to nurse our current plants back to full health instead of buying some younger, spry-er replacements. Next year I'll try to pay some real attention to heat tolerant varieties.
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