Ken, we seem to be bucking heads lately. Maybe it's in the water one of us is drinking that is causing this. Aside from that I respectfully disagree. Correct the lean by pulling it back into vertical at the bend. If you do nothing it will correct the lean on its own but on the top side which you want to avoid. The saw is a mute point. I could have used a hack saw with a 24 tooth blade to cut off that small leader and accomplished the same look he did .LOL The man of action did a good job because he got expert advice and knew it. A great looking specimen it will be. We also have Edwin giving him the correct cultivar name 'Snow Flurry' which all of us so called experts didn't pick up on. Great post and follow ups. Dave

I would say that it's fine to plant these near a drive-way. I would however, get the utility companies to come out and see where the lines are. These trees will have wide, buttressed trunks unless you "limb them up as they grow. They can take on two different forms depending on whether you prune the lower branches or not. I have seen them grow straight, narrow and tall like a telephone pole, with no branches below 20' (as the branches were limbed up as the tree grew) and I have seen them grow wide and spreading and thick at the base. It all depends. In the Pacific Northwest, these trees will be massive, in places like chicago, with extreme cold temps and a much shorter growing season, they will reach half the height they would in the Pacific Northwest. I would say go ahead and plant it. If you're worried about it damaging a driveway, just prune it up as it grows.

Good morning fellow venters, gardeners and insomniacs, Look who's talking here Carol. You were up as late as Dawn, and had the first post of the morning. I'm not out there sunrise picking. Ain't nothing to pick. After coffee, I'm still going back to bed. (Maybe). I started this at 8:00 AM and it's 10AM now. I was up late making yogurt from raw cow's milk. Trying to restore my bones and health. Anyone else do that on here I wonder? I finally found a local pristine source of grassfed Jersey cow's milk. Love it! My folks had a little Jersey cow for me as a toddler and beyond. Yup, I'm trying to talk Braum's into joining the so-called new raw milk revolution, which isn't actually new but practically as old as the earth itself. DS wouldn't touch the stuff unless it comes from a carton. My doctor thinks adults don't need and shouldn't use milk. Strange. Anyways, what he doesn't know won't hurt me. You have my sympathies, on the Japanese beetles or any other nationality. And I can relate to Dawn's woes on the gazillion hoppers. I've never seen so many. Are we going to have a revival of the Great Locust invasion? Lord, I hope not! I can remember when my first born son was a baby and we lived at Waukomis, near Vance AFB near Enid. We had a grasshopper invasion of biblical proportions. Carrying DBS in one day, a huge hopper jumped up and bit him on the ear drawing blood. Like everyone else, I hate and dread hoppers. I read on the Internet, grasshoppers were the only insect ever to be fought by using dynamite. It would be an LOL if it weren't so sad to see how destructive these things are. Do you think we're under a curse? Makes one wonder. Back to venting...it's now officially open season on veggie, melon poachers, & chicken thieves, but MUST we be restricted to just those, and not their other creative endeavors of how to rip people off? Carol, having been an AF wife, maybe you can relate to this...you know how it would make one feel to have a young DH die, leaving 3 young sons without a dad, and a young wife to raise them. So, this was my first departure from living a relatively sheltered life after my DH died. I had rented my house to these people while we were in Texas to check it out to see if we wanted to make a permanent move. Boy, was I naive back then. They were supposed to make a monthly deposit to my bank account for the rent payment to cover the cost of my own mortgage payment. They didn't. I finally had to come back and have them evicted. After moving back in, someone came to the door wanting to haul off all my furniture. These "renters" had taken out loans using my furniture as collateral and then defaulted on the loans. As bad as that was, the worst was they'd broken into a locked storage unit, and stolen the carefully folded US flag from my DH's military funeral, which had been kept for my DS's. One of the few but most precious remembrances of him. Then, not too long after that, we were having dinner at a local restaurant, and here these people were sitting across from us, eating lobster dinners, including their two preschool kids. Since of entitlement? I guess. That was the beginning of a long list of other lessons learned along the way. One of the interesting things I've made mental notes on to stop doing for, were those who complained about what you gave them and then walked off not even saying thanks. Maybe you've never had that happen, but I have, and it's always left me scratching my head, because I would never give anyone something that wasn't fit to use, or good to eat. Well, this list of mine could go on and probably will. One of the signs of advancing age is when one starts rambling. 2nd cup of coffee later:) Dawn, there is NO way I am going to go out in this weather, even in knee high rubber boots picking plums in fence rows braving snakes, in order to make jam or jelly, even if I have to buy plum and blackberry jam til mine start producing better. Those folks that do are welcome to all the plums and blackberries they can pick. Every rock and bush out there has a snake somewhere around it. Now, I watch every step I take even in my own garden where I feel relatively safe. Knowing y'all are busy with harvesting and preserving, I'll try to keep my dumb gardening questions and traumas to a minimum. I think it's just absolutely lovely envisioning all the wonderful things in your pantry, and root cellar. Carol, the one thing I regret making from last summer was all that pickled squash. Most of it is still sitting in the pantry. I guess could still be kept for several years if a famine hits. The great squash famine. With my luck and squash bugs, ya never know. Stay cool y'all, it's supposed to be pressure cooker hot again today. Barbara

I'm glad you're having a great tomato year. If I was guessing, I'd think the weather has been the biggest contributing factor, though the changes to your soil probably also helped. No matter how good my soil is, the weather and how early I get the plants in the ground largely determine what sort of tomato year it will be. You know, you can have the best soil in the world, but once the temperatures are high enough to impede fruit set, which can happen as early as early to mid-May in a hotter/drier than average year like 2011, then most tomato plants stop setting fruit period. So, when the weather allows for lots of fruit set, you've got to give the weather the credit. If you're liking the flavor better, though, then you probably could give the soil credit for that. I generally have not grown Heidi and Viva Italia in the same year, so I don't know that I can tell you how to tell them apart because I think it would be hard to just look at the plants or fruit and know which is which. I always label my plants and make a map that shows the location of each plant by variety name in the garden. I do both on the day they are planted before something happens to the plant labels/tags. Based on my experience with my soil and my weather here in whichever years I have grown either of them, (and yours may not be the same), I think Heidi plants get a foot or maybe 18" taller than Viva Italia and Heidi is less prone to BER in a very dry and very hot year when it is hard to keep the soil evenly moist. The fresh flavor of Viva Italia is more pleasing to my taste buds, but I don't grow either variety for fresh eating---only for canning. I do think that in most years, Viva Italia has been less prone to foliar disease than Heidi, but then I wasn't growing them in the same year, so it is hard to compare since our weather is so variable from one year to the next. Viva Italia pumps out relatively uniform fruit, and some years you see more variation in the shape of Heidi's fruit (but not always) so that might or might not be a way to tell them apart in any given year. Now, here's something interesting---I am moving more and more away from growing paste tomatoes or even from growing Principe' Borghese for drying just as you are achieving success with them. It is more about my evolution as a canner than as a gardener. Over the years, I have gotten to where I prefer the flavor of salsa and pasta sauce made from a wide variety of heirloom slicers and beefsteaks to that of salsa and pasta sauce made with paste tomatoes. Of course, it matters less with salsa since the predominant flavors are those of the peppers and spices and the tomato is just the base flavor. The flavor of a blend of many heirloom tomato varieties is just so superior to the flavor of any paste tomato that I don't even use paste tomatoes in sauce any longer, only in salsa or for sun-dried tomatoes. This year I planted the smallest number of paste tomatoes ever--I think I put maybe 24 to 26 paste plants in the ground versus about 80 non-paste plants. I already had canned at least 160-170 pints of salsa (yes, that's a lot but we give it as gifts to a ton of people at Christmas time) made from blends of slicers, beefsteaks, hearts and cherries before we even got our first ripe paste tomato. If I'd had to wait for the paste types to get busy and produce ripe fruit, I'd just have started making salsa in the last 10-12 days and likely would be sweating it out in the kitchen for all of July. Instead, I am almost done with the tomato canning and am contemplating yanking out the paste types this week after I harvest one more round off of them. It isn't entirely their fault they are so late---they were the last two rows of plants I planted this year and then they got hit by herbicide drift a couple of times, so they have had to struggle to survive. With a pronounced lack of rainfall and with the real summer heat now here, I have no desire to keep watering plants I don't really need. I used to love Principe' Borghese for drying, except for the fact that they are so small and take forever to slice in half before I dehydrate them. It probably isn't a big issue in a small garden with only a couple of PB plants, but my garden is large and I usually plant a lot of PBs, or at least I used to. After the summer of 2012 when I could spend 6 to 8 hours a day picking only PB and nothing else, I told myself I'd let that variety go and only grow larger varieties for drying simply as an efficiency measure. Because I can, freeze and dehydrate so many different crops and not just tomatoes from our large garden, it got to where PB just slowed me down too much. I have to find ways to grow, harvest and preserve food more efficiently or I'll never get to sleep, so the little tomatoes that are time-consuming to process are out. We never liked them as fresh eating tomatoes anyhow since it took dehydrating to bring out their flavor, so we won't miss them much---there's plenty of other varieties to dry that won't be so time-consuming to pick and slice. I started trying varieties that produce larger, meatier paste type fruit after I started using BrokenBar's recipe for wine-marinated sun-dried tomatoes. They're so delicious to eat, so I started looking at her grow lists of big, meaty paste types that she used to make sun-dried tomatoes and have tried several of them. Processing the larger fruit is so much more efficient, so now I am dropping the varieties that produce smaller paste or plum types in favor of those that produce larger ones to use for the marinated SDTs. Next year I plan to plant even fewer paste tomato plants, and I can see the time coming where I won't plant many of them at all. If it is all about flavor, they cannot compete with the heirloom slicers and beefsteaks, and I'd like to find more hearts that do as well here as Brad's Black Heart, so I probably will start trying more of them. I've been trying lots of paste varieties that are new to me from Marianna's Heirloom Seeds that produce significantly larger fruit and have been pretty happy with some of those varieties as they produce fruit that is much larger than that from Heidi or Viva Italia. Whichever paste varieties I keep growing in the future likely will include some of these bigger varieties. I really like Speckled Roman because it does produce huge fruit that's easier/quicker to pick and process. Brad's Black Heart has produced huge fruit this year, including some doubles, and I like the meatiness of Dolly Parton tomatoes. I love Cherry Falls and it has done equally well in the ground or in containers, so I hope you try it again. It has been a long time since I grew Tiny Tim and it was severely lacking in flavor and didn't produce very well, so wouldn't grow it again even if someone paid me to grow it. It is just as waste of space in our garden. Cherokee Purple is great, and I like the closely-related Indian Stripe even better. It is slightly more productive and the fruit seems a little larger than CP most years, so if I had to choose only one of them to grow, I'd only grow IS. Luckily, I don't have to choose only one, so this year I grew Cherokee Purple, Cherokee Purple Heart, JD's Special C-Tex, Indian Stripe and Indian Stripe Burson. I'd hate to have to choose only one of those, but if I had to, I'd choose JD's Special C-Tex because it has the same great flavor as the others, but normally produces larger fruit and produces slightly earlier. It also has the best heat tolerance of them all. My JD's Special C-Tex often sets fruit deeply into July, long after the CP's have been shut down by the onset of our usual summer heat. Pruden's Purple, though, has flavor just as good as any of the ones I just listed, and I only planted two Pruden's Purple plants this year and wish I'd found space for more. So, there you have it----that is why my grow list is so long every year---why grow only Cherokee Purple when there's so many other similar ones that also have great flavor? It is a good thing your garden is small because once you fall in love with the flavor of great varieties, it is easier to grow more than you need and more than you ever could want. I plead guilty to doing that every year, and it is only possible to do that because my garden is too big, which allows me to overplant everything. So, a smaller garden does, by necessity, keep a gardener from planting too many plants. That is not a bad thing. Dawn