I feel your pain. My tomatoes have not done well this year. They had blossom end rot and we treated it quickly, but it took a toll. My Amish paste tomatoes aren’t quite as prolific as in previous years. I love making tomato paste from these tomatoes. It’s the most delicious paste ever. This is the recipe I’ve used for the last few years.
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Fliribundas produce flowers on new growth. Most important is to protect the graft ball at the base of the plant from freeze-thaw cycles that cause the damage. Canes should be trimmed in the spring anyway. Our winters are not very cold; our lone rose bush survived every freezing spell without extra protection, but the hotel garden by the lake where we like to walk once in a while uses the soil/beauty bark piled at the base method.
This site says to add mulch to the top of the soil mound after it hardens to prevent mice from nesting in there.
I was considering cutting it back before setting up some shelter, but I don’t want to spur any growth. But I could wait until late fall? Thanks for the thought
The big problem here maybe isn’t the ground temp, it’s the wind and freeze damage to the plant itself.
I dont cut my roses back until late fall - I’m in northern Ohio. I don’t have a lot of rose knowledge but that is what I’ve always done - cut them to just a few inches high - and they always come back!
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As I’ve said earlier, my tomatoes have not done well this year either. However my daughter in laws plants are like MACHINES- she has so many ! So we have been bartering - her tomatoes for my homemade sourdough bread! And that allows us both to have tomato sandwiches on the regular! 
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Great solution to tomato shortage! 
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I tried something new this year: graffiti eggplant in a pot. I got a bunch of pretty purple flowers but none of them turned into eggplants. Can’t figure out what I am doing wrong.
Eggplants are self pollinating like tomatoes. Meaning each flower has both the male and the female parts to produce the eggplant. However, if the weather is too hot, the pollen might become too sticky to get transferred. If there is no wind or insects, pollination might not happen either. That is what I think happened with my tomatoes… lots of flowers, little pollination happened when the weather overheated.
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You can help pollinate the tomato plants by tapping them. I have mine in cages. I will go by them and “shake” the cages a bit to vibrate the plant. The pollination happens internally in each flower. All it needs is to be shaken to move it. Usually a bee might visit and disturb the flower and get it done. I’ve also heard of using an electric toothbrush to tickle the flower. If it is staked you could again, just tap vigorously on the stake a few times to help vibrate the plant and ultimately the flowers. The same appears to be true for eggplants which seems to also be self pollinating with everything necessary contained in each individual flower.
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I do a lot of that. That said, if the daytime temperatures hover above 85 for prolonged periods of time, pollination does not happen. We had a bad heatwave that fried my tomato flowers. Same thing is apparently happening this year with ketchup tomatoes that are grown in California… too hot - no fruit
My tomatoes are all old Soviet and American heirlooms… apparently they do not like heat.
DH refers to tomatos on the regular as “despair plants”
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“Tickle the flowers”
Yes. I find I need to do this early in the season before the pollinators really get going. It absolutely seems to help ensure the tomatoes set fruit at that stage, at least for me.
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Very nice looking, I am envious!
Tomatoes are a disappointment this year for me and many other local friends. Heck, even the zuc and squash are really slow this year.
Per roses, a gardener friend highly recommended knock out roses. I follower her suggestion to not prune them til early spring (unless they need a small fall trim to look nicer). Gosh, one of them I thought might not come back this year… but eventually it caught up with its nearby twin.
Wait – there is a tomato named after the airplane hijacker?
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Yup! 
This is where I bought the seeds:
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