Brian G

I understand that tomato plants can last for several years if they do not freeze to death, but my plants have had a hard summer. It was extremely hot and dry and the hornworms got to them so most of the leaves are gone or turned brown. I have a few large plants in a greenhouse, and I was hoping to get some more tomatoes before a hard freeze. I am in the Arkansas Ozarks, and I think things will be OK in the greenhouse without heat until the end of November at least.

So I am trying to decide if I should just pull these awful looking plants up and start new ones, or trim them back and hope for new growth, or just do nothing.

Today, Friday the 13th, the Hindenburg Omen once again reared its ugly head. (See this link if you don't know what I am talking about -- www.zerohedge.com/article/hindenburg-omen-here )

Now, I lost bad in the last crash, and I still haven't recovered. What are you doing?

What do you think about leveraged short funds? (Can't remember technical names. There are several of them, closed-end funds traded on the exchanges.)

Without permission from the power company? I know it's probably illegal, but Arkansas has the worst rules regarding this and it's not worth it to do it legally because they make you pay for a special meter, plus additional monthly charges, and then they pay you almost nothing for any power you send back to the grid. So it's pretty clear that they don't want you to do it. What I would like to do is set up PV solar cells to produce about 1 kW max, then just hook this into my system in parallel. This will (I think) offset some of my consumption during the day, and also give me something to run my refrigerator, freezer, and well pump (one at a time) when the power goes out, which it frequently does in this remote location.

I am also a little worried about undervoltage on these appliances. Will I need UV protection breakers for them? (expensive) And what happens if I am not consuming enough of the solar production? Will something burn out, or will voltage go too high? I know how voltage regulators work on mechanical generators, but have no idea what is going on with solar panels.

Yeah, I am an engineer so don't assume that I'm stupid. I am just ignorant about solar cells and electronic power inverters.