"SASBE" means "Self Addressed Stamped Bubble Envelope". Actually I don't care if it's a bubble envelope. A number ten will do-- I'll provide the padding. Put your address on the envelope, add about $1.00 in postage, and I will use it to mail you the seeds you want. You can use the form on my GW member page to e-mail me, and I'll respond with my address. Bev

This is not a picture of the old Fashioned Busy lizzy ..this is a hybrid busy lizzy with a strange yellow and red blossom i don't know much about this variety but it is most definitely a busy lizzy you need only look at the foliage (leaves) to see that it is an impatien...of the hybrid variety ..the old Fashioned Busy lizzy with small pink blossoms can grow much taller i have one that measures 5 feet tall this is the one that i refer to as the old Fashioned pink busy lizzy ....i hope this helps ...i will post a collection of all the different varieties that i have soon as i can...

Sara, I have struggled with the weeds ever since moving to Oklahoma in 1999, and have finally determined that mulching is MORE IMPORTANT in the veggie garden than anything else I do, you know? I see a lot of people in our area who till up the ground and plant a garden in the spring--say about April. The garden looks great as you are driving by. All that lovely brown or reddish-brown soil and all those tiny green shoots in rows. It looks great by mid-May. By early June you see weeds creeping in. By late June the gardens have as much weed and bermuda grass visable as row crops. By July the weeds and grass have won and the veggies are virtually abandoned by the homeowners. Then the same thing happens all over again next year. I can't understand people doing all the work each year to start a garden and then letting the weeds take over. So, every year in my garden I mulch and hand-pull weeds, and every year the weeds are less and less of a problem. Mulching is definitely the key. Now, if I could just "transplant" my weed control success from the veg garden to the rest of my landscape! Susan, I wish the swap were in late June or early July so I could bring bushels of tomatoes and corn and beans! Since the swap is in April, though, about all I can bring is a few letover tomato plants that I didn't have space to plant. If I had planned ahead and planted a lot of cool season crops, I might have had some to share. But I save almost all my space for warm-season stuff, and those plants aren't producing yet. Love-lies-bleeding is very slow to germinate. I always soak the tiny seed in water and sprout it in pots to get it started. I transplant it while it is tiny. I haven't planted any the last couple of years because it usually reseeds itself nowadays. The problem is that I grow 15 or 20 kinds of amaranths/celosias/cockscombs, so I never know for sure just what has reseeded until they get a foot or so tall. Until then they all look alike...well, all the red-flowered ones look pretty much alike...and all the green-flowered ones look pretty much alike, etc., etc. I do love the double blue Japanese morning glory with the picotee edge. I planted it two years ago and it was gorgeous. I haven't tried it since. Simply a space problem. And I do love Grandpa Ott's. It is so beautiful. I noticed that even Wal-Mart has seeds of it now, so guess it it one heirloom that has won full acceptance and has, thus, been successfully saved from extinction. I am waiting for that first ripe tomato. Every day I go and look at the 2 plants that have one fairly large tomato each. I stare at them and try to will those tomatoes to grow faster and ripen sooner. Those big fat green tomatoes stare back at me as if to say "we'll get ripe when we're good and ready and not before". I guess I don't have to tell you that the day they are finally ripe we will have BLTs for lunch AND dinner! Dawn

Dale, One thing to remember about disease resistance/tolerance in tomatoes is that they are only resistance or tolerance and not total immunity. Also, I have found some heirlooms have just as much or more disease resistance/tolerance as some hybrids. The reason you don't see heirlooms labeled for disease resistance is because no specific seed company owns them (they are just out there in the public domain), so no one is willing to pay for the testing to get the seed labeled. It isn't that they don't have some disease resistance and tolerance (after all, there's a reason people saved seeds of that specific variety and passed it down) because many of them do. It's just that the heirlooms haven't been tested and proven to have those tolerances because no one is willing to pay for testing on a variety unless it is their own patented variety. Here's some hybrids we like for flavor and disease resistance/tolerance/: Big Boy Better Boy VFN Big Beef VFFNTA Moreton V (avail. via Harris Seeds or Rutgers/NJAES) Ramapo VF (avail. via Rutgers/NJAES) Jet Star VF Primetime VFNTA Red Defender VFFA-TSWV Scarlet Red VFFASt Celebrity VFFNTA (not as flavorful to me as some of the others, but lots of folks like it more than I do) Supersonic Beefmaster VFNASt Brandy Boy (great flavor but some disease issues) Momotaro (Japanese great flavor; name means 'Tough Boy', great flavor) Porterhouse (Burpee) With the Cherokee Purple, I'd grow it side-by-side with Indian Stripe and compare the performance/flavor of the two. As grown in my garden, the flavor of the two is almost identical and Indian Stripe produces earlier, produces more fruit per plant, and has less cracking. For cherries, I recommend SunGold (or the almost-identical SunSugar which has the same flavor but less cracking), Black Cherry and Sweet Million, which is very similar to Sweet 100 but larger and more productive plants. If you like Druzba, you'd probably also like Eva Purpla Ball or Cuostralee.' If you have something the size of a shed that you want to hide, plant Tess's Land Race Currant and you'll have a huge plant that produces hundreds (well, more likely, thousands) of tiny, currant-sized tomatoes with big flavor. Black Krim and True Black Brandywine are similar to one another and somewhat similar to Cherokee Purple and if I had to choose one of those two, I'd choose True Black Brandywine which produces more heavily and has better disease resistance. Of all the hybrids listed above, Better Boy is probably the heaviest producer in my garden with Big Boy not far behind. However, Scarlet Red and Red Defender (both new to me this year) might surpass them--I just won't rate them higher based on only 1 year's experience with them Other than those two, Big Beef and Beefmaster have performed well for us for years, and Ramapo has been great in the 2 or 3 years we've grown it. I've been very impressed with Moreton, which is in its first year here. The Harris hybrids (Jetstar, Supersonic, Primetime) are impressive too and I have grown them for several years now. As Jay noted above, different tomatoes taste different to different people because our tastebuds vary, so you and your family will have to try them and see which ones have the flavor you prefer. Because flavor is influenced so much by environmental factors, I try to give a variety 2 or 3 years to prove itself 'worthy' before I give up on it. With sandy soil, especially if it has root knot nematodes, the more organic matter you add, the better. In sandy soil it is almost impossible to add too much organic matter. Jay mentioned Whopper and Goliath too, and I meant to add that every time I've grown them they have shown moderately good disease resistance and have been heavy producers. Their flavor is fine, but I just happen to like lots of others too so they don't always make it onto my grow list. I've linked the order page for Ramapo in case you want to try it. And, I hope Bill, who posts here as Tomatomanbilly, will see your thread and respond. He grows a lot of varieties in Anadarko, and he has tried some of the newer hybrids like Red Defender and Scarlet Red too. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Ramapo and Moreton Ordering Info