That's just not my style - mail order. I don't want any plants I can't see in person first. Anyone who can go to L's to buy a water heater and not look @ the plants has much more resolve than I do, especially since there is nowhere else to buy plants around here besides WM. That was it for my plant purchases this year - about $15 of clearance plants. The pansies I bought last Feb. did great until late summer, and I got much more bang for my buck out of them than a lot of other stuff, like Dahlia tubers. The violas I bought in Oct. are blooming like crazy. Chiding me for shopping there or critiquing what I bought or when I bought it won't change the fact that somebody high-up in corp office in the gardening department is spreading these falsehoods as fact. Just wanted to alert the people who shop there (wearing scarves and dark glasses to hide their identity) to the situation. If you don't care, that's fine, move on. If enough people complain, they might stop doing it. Now that you know, you might be able to help someone who's wondering why their plants are struggling, or why their dirt is full of styrofoam.

Raised beds are indeed a factor. When planting tomato plants at grade level, I have grown tomatoes both ways and in average, well-drained soil in an average year (rainy spring, fairly dry summer with sporadic rain, and then a fairly rainy autumn), I don't think one method is any better than the other. The plants grow fine and produce fine either way. That's the short, simple answer. However, gardening in our climate often is not that simple. So, here's the longer and more complicated answer. The differences between deeper planting in holes or more shallow planting in trenches show up if you have difficult soil or a prolonged period of very dry or very wet weather. WITH SOIL THAT DRAINS WELL: In a dry year, if you have soil that drains quickly, you'd want to plant deeply as long as you make sure to water deeply so the water reaches the root zone. If water rationing is common in your area in dry years, you might want to plant in a trench so that the soil can reach the roots in the brief periods of rationing when water is allowed. However, you also need mulch on top of the soil to keep the more shallow roots cool and the soil moist. WITH SOIL THAT DRAINS POORLY AND STAYS TOO WET IN WET YEARS: In tight, dense, compacted soils, particularly those with a high clay content.... In wet years, I'd plant high in a trench in the raised beds so the roots are less likely to become waterlogged. In dry years, I'd plant more deeply but only if I knew I could water deeply as well. You cannot let dense clay type soils get too dry in dry years or water ponds on top of the ground and either rolls off or evaporates before being absorbed. So, while planting deeply helps, you need to mulch deeply as well. Any rain water that falls will percolate down through the mulch to the soil instead of running off bare soil quickly. However, to be honest, I wouldn't plant at grade level in a dry year if I had dense, slow-draining soil. I would plant at grade level in a dry year in well-amended soil that drains pretty well. Now, with raised beds, which is how I generally grow tomatoes: Since my main garden's soil is mostly clay, even my raised beds have a high percentage of clay in them, but it is very well amended so it both holds water well and drains well. After 15 years of amending, it is a loamy clay. The clay ground underneath the beds (and this is a key point) also is amended so it drains better than the unamended clay outside the garden. In my well-drained clay-based raised beds, I vary the planting method with the year....handling a very dry year one way and a very wet one a different way. In a very dry year, I plant deeply and I also water slow and deep with either drip irrigation lines or soaker hoses. The raised beds also are heavily mulched to keep the soil cool and moist, and even the pathways are very heavily mulched in between raised beds in order to insulate the sides of the beds from sunlight and heat. If my raised beds are 8" above grade level, I often will put 8" of mulch in the pathways so that really, just by looking, you cannot tell the beds are raised. In a very wet year (2004, 2007 and April-June of 2009), I plant in shallow trenches in the raised beds in order to keep the roots high enough that the heavy moisture and perpetually wet soil won't negatively impact the plants. I mulch very lightly---just enough to slow down the weeds. I'd rather have the soil exposed to sunlight and wind in order to help dry it out. Sometimes even that isn't enough in our clay, but it is about the best I can do. In 2007, neither deep planting nor trenches worked. We had flooding rains in May-June, and I put as many peppers and tomatoes as possible in large containers because even the raised beds stayed wet too long. In 2009, after getting 12.89" of rain in 24 hours late in April, we had massive issues with wet soil for about 3 months. Most of the tomato plants that had been planted deeply in raised beds (we had severe drought and horrific wildfires prior to this drought-breaking flood) set there with stalled growth for at least 6 weeks, looked awful and seemed near death for a long time. Since the property adjoining ours to the south sits higher than our property, water from that property contained to drain down onto ours for weeks and weeks, but it was draining underground where you couldn't see it. At the lower end of my garden, I could dig down 8 or 10" and hit standing water. I took the back-up tomato plants I had left over and planted them in the one raised bed I hadn't filled with plants before the monsoon began. Even the raised bed was horrifically waterlogged, so I made mounds of soil on top of the raised bed....picture a raised bed with nice tall gopher mounds on it. Then, I planted a back-up tomato plant in the middle of each of those mounds. That's the only time I've ever felt like I had to plant even higher than the raised beds. So, as I hope all this explanation shows.....you have to choose the best planting method for your plants based on how well your soil does drain or doesn't drain as well as on the type of moisture you expect. It is generally a guessing game, but after a decade or so of gardening in the same place, I always can trust my instincts to tell me what to do. One more comment about raised beds. The reason a person should build raised beds is to give them a planting area with great drainage. Raised beds work best for people who have dense, tight, compacted soil....usually with a high clay content, although you'd be surprised at how tightly sand and silt can compact over a long period of time too. To raise the bed, you start with the native soil and amend it. If you have really dense clay, you need to break up the grade level soil first and amend it, then build the raised bed on top of that. By using amended native soil in your raised bed, it is similar to the soil beneath it at grade level and I think that is important in terms of how the water percolates down through the raised bed and into the soil beneath it. (Also it is important in how the roots grow downward as well.....) If your raised beds are very sandy soil or a very light-textured soil-less mix that drains very quickly but it is sitting directly on top of dense clay.....well, that's asking for trouble. You'll have issues with your raised bed drying out too quickly in hot weather while the soil beneath it can hold too much water most of the timel If I had gone to that much trouble to import soil for a raised bed and used 100% imported soil that was not mixed with native soil, I'd plant in trenches that kept the roots mostly in that imported soil. But, I wouldn't have built a bed that way anyhow. To me, if you build a raised bed because you need it for improved drainage, then it makes sense to plant high in trenches. Otherwise, if you are planting in deep holes, you are basically digging down in the raised bed to the soil beneath it in order to put the majority of your plants' roots in the original soil beneath the raised bed. Why, then, have a raised bed at all? However, there's so many extenuating circumstances here..... In a hotter, dryer year you might need to plant deeply in your raised bed anyway in order to keep the roots down deep in cooler, moister soil. And that is why there is no real answer to which way is better.....because there's so many different combinations of variables in terms of temperatures, moisture, the ability of soil to hold and release moisture, etc. None of us has exactly the same soil or the exact same weather, so it is important for each person to experiment with different gardening techniques to see what works best for them in their soil and in their weather. Hope this helps, Dawn

If you can put the plants on the east side of a structure they will get cooler morning sun and be blocked from the blazing afternoon heat. Tomatoes do self pollinate but they appreciate a little help. Commercial greenhouse growers resort to hand vibrating or bringing in bumble bees. The bees vibrate the blossoms, which increases self pollination. Studies have shown that the bees do a better job than the mechanical vibrators. You want to attract tiny native halictid (sweat) bees to your plants and the best way to do that is to have lots of flowers in the area. Something with small open faced flowers should work well. But this type of bee is solitary so its population size is determined by availability of nesting sites as well as food (flowers). If there are wildflowers and or flowering fruit trees around it is a good omen.

Well, I don't know the variety (and I'm not sure what heirloom means) but I went outside this morning to do a more thorough count. I had thought that maybe yesterday's count of 68 tomatoes may have been overblown--maybe I was mistakenly including some tomatoes from the neighbor plant's branches. But no, there was no mistake. I actually undercounted yesterday. This morning I counted 84 tomatoes, small to medium size. It wouldn't surprise me if there are upwards of 90 tomatoes on that plant. Its 6 closest neighbor plants all have tomatoes in the 20's count and the 30's count, but they're bigger, rounder tomatoes. I bet the 84-count plant is a different variety--either that or it's somehow a mutant. The shape of the toms on the 84-count plant isn't as round as the toms on the other plants. The shape is just slightly oblong, by which I mean the height of the tomatoes is ever so slightly greater than the width of the tomatoes. Kind of reminds me of the shape of tear drops but no way as oblong as tear drops. Just slightly oblong. There is no way this variety is the "cherry/grape" tomato variety. These tomatoes are much, much, much bigger than the "cherry/grape" variety of toms, but they're smaller than my other "regular" tomatoes. I'll take a picture soon. Will photobucket.com or some other sites accept a 1.2 to 1.9 megapixel image? I don't want to put the photo on Google Plus, Facebook, Flickr, etc. I'd prefer the Photobucket and ImageShack places--if they'll accept megapixel-sized images.