I found your seed list trying to find a source for 'big month', which a friend of mine grew last year and really liked but didn't save seed from and now can't find a commercial source for. I'm personally interested in 'green giant'. I love green tomato juice. So far I've grown 'green zebra' (which did fairly well), 'emerald evergreen' (which performed terribly), and 'Aunt Ruby's German green' (which was probably the best of the three.) Do you have a favorite green-when-ripe tomato you can recommend? I've read high praise for the 'green giant'. Feel free to contact me if you think I might have anything you'd be interested in trading for. I don't have any of the tomato varieties you're looking for, but I have a few tomato varieties you don't have. I would particularly note San Marzano redorta and Polish linguisa which are very similar, very large/long extremely meaty paste types. They're a very tasty fresh eating tomato but my family's very first choice for canning whole, for sauce, for roasted tomatoes, for paste, etc.

my seed list was last updated 12/7/14. some seeds have been traded/used since then. but I have not found the magic link to update my list. can email current list to anyone interested.

Hi, Alice. Nice to see you! I don't have anything specifically on your wishlist, except maybe sunflowers. The Honey Bear is truly awesome. If you can find enough items you want, I'd like to trade for your: nicandra 'Black Pod' phlox 'Dwarf Beauty' rudbeckia 'Irish Eyes' sunflower 'Autumn Beauty' - I've had this one before, and really liked it~~ Oh, and I do have HH on my list... PLMK, Constance.

Gary, Oh, I don't "think" you said enough to get yourself in trouble. I am sure the GW admin can distinguish between an innocent mention of one's livelihood versus blatant advertising. I am not sure how strongly the rule is enforced, but the rule as I understand it is that no commercial advertising is allowed in any of the forums. If you say something about your business that they think comes too close to advertising, I think they send you a "warning" by e-mail. Anyway, I'm glad you mentioned your operation. How else would someone like me down here in southern OK know you were up there in northern OK? I'm glad to know we have someone else up there (in addition to Lisa) growing heirlooms that we can refer people to when they're searching for plants or for information, answers to the hardest tomato questions, etc..... Maybe you cannot refer people here to your operation, but the rest of us can. There's a guy in Texas who sells heirloom tomatoes by mail but ONLY mails them within the state of Texas. (He has a real job and trying to mail them all over the country is too time-consuming for a part-timer.) I've always wished 'somebody' here in Oklahoma had that kind of business because lots of folks here want to try heirlooms and some people don't have the space to start seeds indoors or their job takes them out of town too much, etc. Finally, what would any of us do if a late freeze (or baseball-sized hail or a tornado or a wildfire) wiped out every plant we had in the ground in, let's say, early May? Would we be forced to grow only hybrids? Well, it wouldn't be the worst thing on earth, but it would be close. No. We'd send out an SOS and find someone in the state of Oklahoma who raises/sells heirlooms and we'd be hoping and praying we could find someone like that. So, you see, we NEEDED to know that you are there. Laspasturas, Welcome home to Oklahoma and also welcome to the Oklahoma forum. I'm glad you decided to stop lurking and start 'talking' to us. I read over your list and think most everything you have on it ought to grow just fine here. If there's one that might not produce well here, it likely would be German Red Strawberry since the heart types don't generally produce well in our endless and brutal summer heat. I grow indeterminates in containers and, in general, they perform quite well there. The larger the container, the better they perform. I grow indeterminates in containers of all sizes from cat litter buckets that seem slightly smaller than 5-gallon buckets (I've never measured to see how much the buckets hold but guess 4 to 5 gallons) to molasses feed tubs (about the size of a half-whiskey barrel, so I'm guessing 20 gallons or so?). To grow in containers here in OK, you have to pay careful attention to watering. In our hottest weather, and by that I'd say anything up to about 105 degrees, the containers may need to be watered twice a day. When the temp goes over 105, I drape old bedsheets over my containerize plants to shade them and then water them at meal times: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Luckily, that kind of heat usually only lasts a few days. Because Oklahoma's heat is so brutal, I try to strategically place my containers where the plants will receive 6 to 8 hours of direct sun and no more than that. I get better production from those plants than from containers placed to that they get sun for 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day. The plants also are happier if they are not lined up alongside a driveway, patio or south or west-facing wall that reflects a lot of heat up onto them. And, light-colored containers reflect heat away from the roots better than dark-colored containers do. AND, I spray-paint my kitty litter buckets a nice shade of green or blue (using Krylon Fusion paint designed specifically for plastics) so I don't look too much like a redneck gardener (not that there's anything wrong with being a redneck gardener). I don't think that your questions about how many tomatoes to grow for canning or dehydrating is a hijacking of the thread at all, but I am worried that people with a similar question in the future wouldn't find this thread if they do a GW search because the search feature here is a little squirrelly (with no dispect to our friends the squirrels). So, if it is OK with you, I'll start a separate thread about growing tomatoes for canning and drying and such in the hope that by putting the words canning and drying in the title, it will ensure future searches find that thread. I'll get busy on that thread after dinner. Dawn