I've been growing tomatoes in the northeast for 25 years. When I first started I could harvest perfect beefsteaks into Nov by throwing some plastic over the plants in Sept- the leaves would stay healthy and plants vigorous through Sept. Then early blight arrived and everything changed. Plants will just start to ripen fruit and then begin to die. You usually get a rush of tomatoes that are perfect then quality rapidly declines as plants succumb to blight. For quite a few years I've grown several variety of heirlooms and have found a couple that are fairly productive even in the face of blight but things vary here a great deal year to year now. Many small commercial growers have resorted to growing heirlooms under plastic because that is the only reliable way to assure productivity. Serious home growers too. I won't go to that much trouble for tomatoes, but this year was the best tomato year in probably 15 years. I first thought it was because of the weekly applications of copper I applied but it was a banner year for many growers here in the southeast NY area with many experiencing a major reduction in blight damage. Around here the hot item is heirlooms grafted to the roots of more vigorous varieties, but that is also too much trouble for me, although there are several mail order nurseries that offer them. Things like Purple Brandywine on Better Boy roots. I think a better deal is to grow Burpie's Brandy Boy which is a hybrid combining Better Boy with Brandywine, creating the flavor of the latter on a more productive, vigorous plant. If you want to grow what is hands down the most vigorous and productive beefsteak variety I've ever ever grown, get some Country Taste seeds somewhere. At peak I must have been harvesting 20 pounds a week from one obscenely huge plant. I'm still eating ones I picked green about 3 weeks ago. It reminded me of the beefsteak plants I used to grow, but more tomatoes. Not quite as tasty as a really good heirloom though, but so, so much more productive than any I've tried. For the most productive cherry- that would be Sun Gold or one of its improved strains. Silly sweet with almost no acid. Fun to browse but I prefer a real tomato. Many people think it's the best thing since sugar enhanced sweet corn though. Now that I can't stand.

Just wanted to address the picture (my pics) issue really quickly. I have often been accused of over-sharing on the internet. I live on a corner lot, so anyone who frequents this forum could probably drive by and recognize my garden. If a pedophile is lurking here, they could see my kids and perhaps figure out where I live. That does concern me somewhat, but I watch my kids like a hawk, and I think that a true pedophile has many more extensive and disgusting sources of phtos than my baby butt garden pics. I can't help but share pics of my garden and my kids, they are my biggest sources of pride and I just love to share. I know I am naive but I feel in my heart that most if not all gardeners are good folks. I trust this forum and I feel safe here. As for my grow list: I am going to try to grow Nematode Resistant plants when possible. I am scaling back this year as far as varieties for this reason. I am currently on a seed hunt for: Pole Beans: Poamoho or Alabama No 1 Bush Beans Monoa Wonder or Harvester Lima Bean Nemagreen Bell pepper charleston belle or carolina wonder Wando Peas My herbs, lettuces, spinach etc don't seem affected by RKN so I will again grow tons of them. I hope to grow around 20 Nematode resistant tomatoes (assorted). I cannot find any nematode resistant cucs, squash, or soybeans, so I am unsure what I will do for those or if I will just skip them this year. I'd also love to grow carrots and beets but last year both were a complete failure (tiny stunted crop). Jo

Leslie, Your grow list is fine You just need better weather. (grin) You know, if I lived where you live, I'd google and read about gardening in Phoenix and see what varieties they grow there. Your climate really is almost a desert climate, and your area tends to go from too cold to too hot almost overnight in spring That's tough on gardeners and their gardens because about the time the garden should start producing, y'all get ridiculously hot and the plants stall or drop blossoms. If Heidi did well for you, then I think it likely that Phoenix F-1 and Wuhib would as well. I love Gary 'O Sena, but it produces best for me when I get it into the ground in February or early March, which might not be possible for you with your colder spring weather. If I wait until late March or early April to plant Gary O Sena, , we often get too hot for it to set well long before it has set many fruit. In my best Gary O Sena year, I put the plants in the ground in early March and just covered them up with floating row cover on cold nights. In hot climates where blossom drop is common, plants that produce smaller fruit, like Jaune Flammee and Fourth of July (not my favorite in terms of taste and texture, but it does produce well in heat) and even Early Girl will set more fruit per plant than varieties that produce larger fruit like Gary O Sena, True Black Brandywine or JD's Special C-Tex. I've gotten nice yields the last few years in hot weather from Early Girl, Cherry Falls (fruit are large for a cherry but too small to be considered anything else I guess), Heidi, Porter, Porter Improved, Jaune Flammee, sometimes from Black Cherry though it seems to shut down a while in the worst heat, SunGold and SunSugar of course, and other paste types like Schiavonne's Italian Paste and Speckled Roman. The varieties that produce tomatoes larger than a tennis ball can shut down fast in heat due to blossom drop, so I can see why they don't produce well in SW OK. I grew both Sioux and Super Sioux for a long time, but over a period of years, they seemed to produce less well each year than the year before, so I finally stopped growing them. For me, Rutgers is more dependable in our heat that Sioux. Jubilee also does well here in Oklahoma, though I haven't grown it as far west as you live. With peppers, hots outproduce sweets in our hot weather, and small mini bells or Yummy Orange peppers produce much earlier than regular, larger sweet bells. I harvest hot peppers all summer and fall, but the sweets usually give me one early summer harvest and then stall a long time before they produce a bunch more to harvest in the fall. They just don't do well in our heat. With green beans, bush types that have DTMs in the upper 40s and low 50s have a pretty good chance of producing well before it gets too hot. In my garden, pole beans usually don't produce much from a spring planting before it gets too hot, but do much better, producing a harvest in October from a mid-summer planting. Also, I have found that the bean varieties that produce flat, roma-type beans instead of rounded, green snap types, do better in heat. From a spring planting, I get good harvests from the rounded snap beans like Contender, Top Crop, Purple Queen, Royal Burgundy and Provider, and from roma types like Roma or Roma II, Tanya's Pink Pod, Purple Dove, Red Swan, Purpuriat, and the golden types of romas that produce yellow bean pods like Capitano. With pole beans, I get a better harvest in fall from seed sown in mid-summer than I get in summer from seed sown in fall. It is all heat-related. Pole beans that have produced well for me in heat, in addition to Rattlesnake, include white half-runner, Jiminez, Musica and Garrafal Oro. Most of the pole beans from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange that I've grown have produced better in our climate in fall than in spring, so I usually plant bush types for the summer harvest and pole types for a fall harvest, and in the dead of summer, we grow a wide variety of southern peas. If you don't like the flavor and/or texture of the typical blackeyed peas, you might like Pinkeye Purplehull, or any variety of lady peas, zipper peas or cream peas. Do you grow any melons or winter squash? They handle heat better than almost anything else I grow. I plant then with the okra and let them carpet the ground underneath the okra as a living mulch, while the partial shade from the okra plants provides shade that helps keep the melons, in particular, from sunburning in the vicious summer heat. I prefer to grow the smaller refrigerator melons like Sugar Baby, Blacktail Mountain, Yellow Doll, Yellow Baby, and Tiger Baby because they take up a lot less space than full-sized melons and have quicker DTMs as well. Seminole pumpkin, which is a very drought-tolerant and heat-tolerant winter squash, produces better for me in the heat than almost anything else. Armenian cucumber, which actually is a melon you can harvest at the immature stage and use like a cucumber, produces well in summer heat, but some years it is prone to mosaic virus. This year, though, mine produced until November. My go-to varieties for cantaloupes (actually the ones we grow here in the USA are muskmelons, not true cantaloupes) are Hale's Best Jumbo and Carole. Do you grow cucumbers? They produce well in heat as long as they are well-watered. 2013 was probably the best cucumber year I ever had, and the varieties that tolerated the heat for almost the entire summer were Sumter and County Fair. After I had made enough pickles for all of southern OK to eat for the next year, I started slicing up the excess cukes and feeding them to my chickens and to the deer. I think the last cucumber plants finally gave up and died in the latter half of August, a few weeks after I stopped watering them. You might want to go to the website of Native Seed/SEARCH and look for desert varieties grown by indigenous tribes. You have to read their descriptions carefully because some of their varieties only do well in the high mountain regions where nights are cooler, but they also have varieties that do well in extreme heat and drought. Another seed company that sells varieties that are proven to grown in our region is Willhite Seed in Poolville Texas I've never had poor production from their varieties, though my weather tends to be more gentle than yours. Sometimes when I want to grow a variety that is new to me, I check to see if WIllhite carries it. If they don't, I instantly have doubts that it will do well here. I noticed they offered Phoenix F-1 tomato for several years before I finally bought seed and tried growing it. Then, it did so well here that I wished i had tried it earlier than I did. Sweet potatoes do great in the heat, but drought can be hard on them, and the last three years I have had increasing trouble with voles eating them underground. So, if you have voles, the sweet potatoes might produce just fine in the heat but the voles might beat you to the harvest. There are some hot-weather greens that do tolerably well, but I have found I don't like the flavors of some of them. Lambs quarters will grow all summer here, and so will amaranth, but we don't like to eat them. (My dad, on the other hand, loved lamb's quarters.) You also might try Egyptian spinach or New Zealand spinach, which I think is tetragonia. the problem I have found with most of the hot weather greens is that the pests really seem to flock to them. Your climate is so close to being a desert type climate that I think it always is going to be incredibly challenging to garden there, and you'll only find what works for you in your specific weather with a lot of trial and error. Do you grow herbs? Often, when the heat has shut down everything else, my herbs still are growing like mad, so at least I have them to be happy about when the rest of the garden is hot and droopy (or dead). Dawn

Yeah, I would agree with you. If memory serves, last year I must have pulled 100 (give or take) jalapenos off one of my plants throughout spring, summer and fall. The article must mean that a jalapeno plant will probably have 25-35 pods at a time which sounds about right for a fully grown plant. Heck, I remember one day late in October where I must have got 30-35 pods from one plant.