I only grow about 10 varieties per year, so my list would be dull by comparison.

This year, with the weather problems, I was especially impressed (and surprised) with Early Girl Improved and Christa. These two had the healthiest plants and fewest rotted fruit in my heavy soil. This might make a nice combination with Early Girl producing over an extended time frame, and Christa making a lot at one time(late), and seeming to keep very well.

Hi Scott,

You know, I grew Early Girl for many years.....maybe ten or fifteen and then I tried both Early Girl Improved and Bush Early Girl about three years ago.

Bush Early Girl was the most prolific early tomato I have ever raised. The plants, which I raised from seed, were put into the ground in mid- to late-March when they were about 8 weeks old and just starting to flower. By late-May I was harvesting ripe fruit from 18" tall plants that probably had at least 15 full-sized fruit each at that time. The plants were so covered in fruit that you could hardly see the foliage. The plants eventually got a little taller, and continued to produce masses of fruit well into August. I was really pleased with it.

I grow so many heirlooms, though, that I have dropped Early Girl from my grow list this year. The last 4 years I have used Better Bush grown in 12" pots to give me early tomatoes.....usually I have ripe ones by mid- to late-April. I buy 2 Better Bush plants in 6" pots the minute they arrive at the Lowe's or Home Depot stores (in Dallas, Fort Worth or Denton, Texas) in mid-February.

I plant the tomatoes in a good potting mix with Tomato-Tone organic food added to the soil. I set them on the sunny patio near the garage/barn, and then I carry them inside at night if the nights are going lower than 45 degrees and carry them back out in the morning. Usually these plants are in flower when I buy them, so I get fruit pretty fast. Using these potted tomatoes to get early tomatoes leaves me more space in the garden for more heirloom varieties. By the way, I would buy Bush Early Girl, Early Girl Improved or even plain old Early Girl if they were available in 6" pots at the same time Better Bush is, but that hasn't been the case.

I raise 90% of the tomatoes I grow from seed, but the Better Bush plants just help me get early tomatoes just when I am craving them most.

I COULD grow my own Better Bush plants from seed, but in order to get them as large as I want them by mid-February, I believe I would have to start the seeds in early November. I just don't want to have to worry about raising seedlings under lights during the busy holiday season.

I am not familiar with a tomato named Christa. Is it an heirloom or a hybrid? Did you raise it from seed or purchase it yourself? Just curious....I am always on the lookout for a new variety to try. (That statement would make those who know me laugh....some years I try 40 new varieties.....but with thousands available, I'll never get around to trying them all.)

Happy Growing!

Dawn

Wow, am I impressed at all the Tomatoes everyone grows. My DH plants/tends the produce as I'm into ornamentals. But there are times when I have a recipe (can you call BLTs a recipe?) where I absolutely must have a good tomato. The old reliable has been and will always be Early Girl. Even this year when everything else rotted from all the rain Early Girl survived. I also like the taste of Jet Star. But recently I saw a show on PBS about a tomato taste off, and a Hybrid tomato beat everything - even Cherokee Purple (which usually won). It was Biltmore. So I guess we will try Biltmore next year if I can remember to buy/sow seeds.

Hi Mary,

I have thought about growing Biltmore ever since it popped up in the Park Seed catalog, but.....there's so many tomatoes and so little space in the garden for new ones!

Usually, when another tomato beats Cherokee Purple in a taste test, it is either one of the Brandywines or Aunt Ginny's Purple, I think. In our own personal taste tests here with friends and family, Black Krim usually is everyone's favorite. Well, actually Brandywine is, but it produces too few fruit per plant and Black Krim is usually a close second.

I did a little research on Biltmore and here is what I found. It produces ripe fruit about 70 days from transplanting. It is not quite as early of a producer as Mountain Spring, but produces stronger, better-quality fruit. It does produce earlier than Florida 47 and 71, which might matter to commercial growers who want to get produce to the market as early as possible. It is similar to Sunpride and Sunbeam (which I haven't grown).

It does have pretty good disease resistance, being resistant to: alternaria stem canker, verticillium wilt race 1, fusarium races 1 and 2, and gray leaf spot(stemphyllium solani).

Its' breeder and vendor is Seminis Vegetable Seeds (no surprise there since they dominate the market). It is an F-1 hybrid. It produces 1 to 1.5 lb fruits on tall, determinate plants. The fruit is large, smooth, red, uniform, no green shoulders.

The only info I found that would make me think twice is that it is described as being adapted to the eastern U.S., so there is a chance that it wouldn't grow well here in the southcentral U.S.

Still, the fact that it won a taste test makes me want to try it anyway. I guess I'll add it to my list of "Maybe's" for 2008.

Dawn

I can tell you what I planted, but I'm not sure I can say which I liked best. I'm pretty disorganized when it comes to putting the plants in the ground, so once everything started producing, I wasn't entirely sure what was what.

I am still enjoying my sweet millions and will probably plant them, but its likely they will come up volunteer all over the place as many of them have dropped to the ground.

I grew Cherokee purple for the first time and really liked those. They are pretty easy to separate from the others.

Other than that, I think I grew Arkansas travellers, Celebrity and maybe Rutgers. The celebrity are always reliable, so I always grow them. I didn't have any that were disappointing so probably will grow all again, depending on what's available when it's time to shop for plants. I don't have room for much more than that and will try to restrain myself a little next year so I can grow something besides tomatoes in my small space.

Hearing thunder out there.

Pat

Pat,

It has taken me a l-o-n-g time to get organized enough that I consistently label each plant and.....most years, the labels stay on/around/near the plants long enough for me to know which tomato is which. Well, unless the labels become detached from their stake....or the dogs dig up the stakes...or the non-fading marker fades....or, even worse, the plants makes lovely, yummy fruit but they bear no resemblance to the variety on the label, leaving me to wonder how I got them scrambled!

I can usually figure out which plant is which, based on the type of foliage it has and type of fruit it produces.

I grew Celebrity for many years, until I became hooked on heirlooms.

Every year I try to cut back on how many tomatoes I plant so I'll have more room for other stuff. If only the tomato catalogs didn't make every variety sound so amazing and so tempting! (And we all know that most tomatoes are not as amazing as the catalogs make them sound!)

This year I do have a lot more melons in space that had tomatoes last year, and I am enjoying the melons a lot.

If you are hearing thunder, then I am jealous! We've had only about an inch of rain in the last 30 days and it is VERY hot and VERY dry here. We desperately need rain. We were paged out to three fires today....two of them prior to 9 a.m. I hope today's increase in fire activity is not a sign of things to come, but I look at how dry the grass is, and look at all the big round bales of hay in the fields, and am starting to expect trouble if we don't get rain here very, very soon.

I know that many of you have had too much rain, but we haven't had enough. So, send your excess rain our way or....I am going to have to start watering the tomatoes and what is left of the rest of the garden.

Dawn

Two things about that taste test in which "Biltmore" won the taste off: (1. It took place at a farmers market, so the tasters were just ordinary people not some group of weird culinary gourmets who also enjoy the taste of sparrows feet or some such. (2. The farmers market was located in one of the Carolinas (can't keep them straight-no offense intended to Carolinians), so you are right about the east coast. But it's not like a New York Tomato.......My DH tried the Arkansas Traveler this year too, but it rotted along with the others (except as I said, Early Girl)......Many many years ago our local ag agent was out at the ag veggie center in Bixby for an open house and she recommended Jet Star as the one hybrid tomato that was as tasty as some of the heirlooms. I still think it's one of the tastiest around, and I'm not a tomato lover so they aren't like donuts to me (I never met a donut I didn't like).

I'm not really a gourmet. This year I ordered seeds and got either a "bonus" pack or a mixup in the order.. anyway it was Mariana's Peace. It has leaves like a brandywine. It was much more prolific than the Brandywine I grew last year, but that's comparing two different years with very different weather patterns. Anyway, the taste was at least as good as brandywine, and it started producing early and kept going. I will definitely find a place for at least two Mariana's Peace next year.

Jet Star didn't do as well for me but it was in a different garden area; who knows..

I thought "Classica" had a lot better taste than the standard Roma. The Romas were heavier producers though.

Arkansas Traveler was a winner. Last year's best tomato, Burpee Buck's County Hybrid, did fairly well again. It seemed like it was later than last year. Tasta is good.

Mary,

You know, I really do trust the results of taste tests done by ordinary people SO much more than a taste test involving food experts/food snobs! Also, the fact that it was conducted in North Carolina makes me give more serious consideration to giving Biltmore a try. For the most part, in fact about 90% of the time, if a tomato does well in North Carolina, it will do well here. Except for the fact that they have higher humidity there than we have here (most years), we seem to have fairly similar growing conditions.

I have grown many tomatoes introduced/re-introduced by Craig LeHoullier (nctomantoman) over the years, and many of them have become some of our favorites, including Cherokee Purple, Cherokee Chocolate, Cherokee Green, Little Lucky and Lucky Cross. I also have tried a lot of the old Livingson tomatoes (and other heirlooms) that he has recommended and that has been interesting and fun too. So, if a tomato does well in NC, it seems to do well here. They also have the same weather challenges we have, including massive thumderstorms and the occasional wicked hailstorm.....so I think our two climates share many similarities.

Gayle,

Bucks County is one of the few hybrid tomatoes I have tried in recent years that has had flavor pretty much equal to that of some of the heirlooms. Brandy Boy is another. When BB was came onto the market, I was skeptical....thinking that they just wanted us to think it would be as tasty as Brandywine and that it probably wouldn't be worth trying. I was wrong....and Brandy Boy has been a big producer for us and the tomatoes have excellent flavor. These two hybrids, as well as Burpee Porterhouse, give me hope that the tomato breeders are learning from the heirloom world and are now trying to breed FOR flavor (FINALLY!), instead of just breeding plants that produce red globes that ship well.

I have grown Marianna's Peace for 2 or 3 years now and have not been unhappy with it at all. This year it was not quite as tasty as it was last year, but then this year's weather was awful for tomatoes, at least in May and June. I tend to drop it off my list because I am wanting to try something new....and then when it is actually time to start seeds, I go ahead and start a few of Marianna's Peace, telling myself.....'go ahead, you can squeeze in one more variety'.

My Jetstar didn't do anything this year, but that is my fault. I tried to squeeze in a few more plants in a lower-lying area of my veggie garden that DID NOT have raised beds, and that part of the garden was a swamp by mid-June and I lost that whole row of plants to root rot.

I have not tried Classica, but did grow Martino's Roma this year, and it was the most heavily-producing paste-type tomato that I have EVER grown, and that is saying a lot. Martino's Roma was so heavily covered in fruit that you couldn't see the foliage, and it produced for a long time too.

Arkansas Traveler is one of the most consistent producers in our garden, although I only grow it about every other year. It handles the heat incredibly well, and sometimes produces so much fruit that I start thinking to myself that I am getting tired of it. (Isn't that awful? It isn't that it is not tasty.....just that some years there are so many of them!) I usually feel the same way about Super Fantastic, Mule Team and Boxcar Willie by the end of the growing season. On the other hand, I NEVER get tired of the flavor of Blac Krim, Nebraska Wedding or Cherokee Purple.

Well, I am watching the Weather Channel this morning and see rain moving across NE Oklahoma. Wish it was here.

Y'all have a wonderful Saturday.

Dawn

I'm not sure what I'm going to grow next year. I'm not sure what if anything I learned this year.

For me, 18 plants in small area was unproductive. So far this year I may have gotten a total of 30 lbs of fruit. Almost all of that had major splitting, ripened unevenly or got eaten by some type of caterpillar. The 8 foot 1 X 1 stakes are too weak, one has snapped at ground level and several others are leaning way over. They start deteriorating at ground level as the water works its way into them. Will probably use some cattle panels next year and plant far fewer plants, 8 maybe but for sure no more than 10. With luck Next year will be the first year I get them in the ground on time.

Hank

Hank,

I have grown tomatoes for 25 years on my own, and grew them with my parents and grandparents for virtually my whole life, and I have NEVER had such a bad weather year for tomatoes....although there were a couple of rainy years in the 1970s that came close to being as bad as this year.

Tomato yields were affected negatively by the weather in several ways, including:

1) Very Late freezes, including some very late sleet and snow, killed a lot of plants that were already in the ground. The colder soil temps then drastically slowed down regrowth and stunted the plants. This is the worst thing that can happen to tomato plants...even some of the ones that survived remained somewhat stunted and slow to produce.

2) Excessively wet weather impacted tomatoes in several ways, but primarily by keeping the soil so waterlogged that the roots could not grow. In addition, continuous heavy rains leached nutrients out of the soil big-time, so even the plants that survived sitting in waterlogged soil were nutritionally deprived and grew slowly for a long time.

3.) Excessive humidity made pollen sticky, causing it to clump and slowing down/preventing pollination.

4.) Excessive clouds slowed down both the growth and ripening of the tomatoes that eventually formed.

Any single one of these four factors is enough to really mess up your tomato production, and having all four at once is highly unusual. I would say that we are unlikely to ever see such awful tomato-growing conditions again, but.....this is Oklahoma, after all, and our weather will do what it will do. Hopefully, though, we will have a better year in 2008 for growing tomatoes.

As you learned this year, planting tomatoes at the earliest reasonable time is very important in our climate because we have such a brief period of time in the spring when the nights are warm enough for pollination to occur and the days are not yet too hot to slow down/stop pollination. I tend to plant too early as opposed to planting too late, because most years I can cover up plants and protect them from a late freeze, but you can't do anything to counter the effects of the heat.

If you are only going to have 8 plants next year, you probably want the ones that are most productive, so you get the most tomatoes possible in the space you have.

If I were growing eight plants and I wanted maximum production for the space available, I would probably plant these:

1. Better Boy--heavy production, excellent disease resistance, very reliable, good to great flavor

2. Jet Star--heavy production, good to great diseaese resistance, usually reliable, good to great flavor

3. Early Girl OR Bush Early Girl OR Early Girl Improved--early tomatoes, good disease resistance, good flavor. Of the three, Bush Early Girl always gives me the most tomatoes per plant.

4. Fourth of July (simply COVERED in 2 to 4 oz. tomatoes all summer long)--Very early producer that continues to produce all summer long, excellent disease resistance, and fair to good flavor. Please note when I describe the flavor as fair to good that they are not bad at all--and certainly taste better than ANY grocery store tomato. They have typical or average hybrid taste, and if you have never had the wonderful flavors of heirlooms, you would think these are perfectly fine. It it just that I am spoiled by the wonderful flavors of all the heirlooms, but most heirlooms produce 1/10th of the yield that Fourth of July will give you. Bloody Butcher is an heirloom that reminds me of 4th of July although it has not been quite as productive in my garden.

5. Sweet Million cherry OR Husky Red Cherry. You probably only need one or the other of these. Husky Red Cherry is a short internode plant. Sweet Million can easily get 8 feet tall if caged or trellised. Sweet Million will give you an abundance of smaller cherries. Husky Red Cherry will give you fewer, but larger, cherries.

6. Porter is a small tomato that is larger than a cherry but NOT a round beefsteak, more of an oval salad type. Fruit are reddish-pink and these plants produce all summer long no matter how hot it gets. They are very disease resistant and VERY heat/drought tolerant.

7. Burpee Porterhouse will give you the huge, tasty red tomatoes of your dreams. New on the market and one that has greatly impressed a lot of tomato maniacs.

8. Celebrity. Chosen for its outstanding disease resistance and reliability.

If you could squeeze in 2 or 3 more, SunGold is a great golden-orange cherry that produces in about 57 days, Cherokee Purple and Black Krim are heirlooms that give you some of the tastiest tomatoes you will ever eat.

Dawn

Hi everyone!!

I still have one spring tomato plant that hasn't had any ripe yet, Orange Oxheart, getting close though. A lot of my 31 spring plants were stunted also, and tomatoes that were suppose to be approx. 1LB. were small and ripened unevenly, or sunscalded. But the plants are all still alive and doing pretty good. Fall tomato plants are not growing very fast, the Black Prince is about 3ft. the others are much smaller, it seems like when they get dry they grow a little bit. I have around 30 different kinds for fall.

I will grow again:
Cherokee Purple Black Krim, Brandywine Suddath & Red, Homely Homer, Beefsteak, Green Zebra, ARGG (haven't tried a ripe one yet, keep picking them too early), Caspian Pink, Beefmaster, Bigboy. I won't count anything out for certain, since it was a harsh season.

Next year for new ones, I want to grow:
Nebraska Wedding,Omar's Lebanese, BigZac (just to see how big I can get one to grow), Aunt Ginny's Purple, Eva's Purple Ball, Aunt Gertie's Gold, Little Lucky, Lucky Cross, BrandyBoy, Sweet Million, Matt's Sweet Cherry, Sungold, Purple Haze, Coyote, Persimmon, Super Sioux, Prudens Purple.

I want to regrow these also, I had these for Fall, but killed them by overwatering, I think.

Great White, Snow White, Prince Borghese.

I read this the day you posted it, but have been so busy with a new job, I haven't had to time to put mine on here. I have some pics of some Catepillars for Susanlynne, that I will try to put on here this week too. Sheri

Hi Sherri!

Well, I guess that Orange Oxheart is the Diva of the Garden this year, making you wait and wait for her to make her grand debut! lol I hope you get ripe ones soon. I tend to stay away from oxhearts. They have never produced well for me.....being very late and also not producing very many fruit per plant. They do have superior flavor though.

The first year I grew green when ripe (GWR) tomatoes, I think I had Aunt Ruby's German Green, Green Grape and Lime Green Salad. I kept picking them all too soon, being impatient to try their wonderful flavors and also not really knowing what their ripe color would look like. Finally, I got really busy for a couple of weeks and got behind on picking tomatoes.....and when I finally made it down to the garden, my GWRs had a light yellow/amber color to SOME of their skin (the upper portion of the tomato), while the rest of the skin remained green. When I felt of one of the ARGG's, it felt soft enough that I believed it was finally ripe. It was! The flavor of that first ARGG knocked me out! The GWRs have such a unique and yummy flavor....but I have a hard time getting anyone else besides me to eat one....eating green tomatoes just seems 'unnatural' to most people. You'll love your ARGG once you finally get to eat a ripe one!

I have a few comments about some of the ones on the list of tomatoes you want to grow:

Nebraska Wedding: Wonderful, meaty, juicy, tasty fruit on plants that are incredibly disease resistant and drought tolerant. One of my faves.

Omar's Lebanese: Very good producers, although they don't get as large here as I had hoped. Had lots of disease problems (foliar stuff) but bounced back. Good flavor.

Big Zac: Was a huge disappointment. Didn't get nearly as large here for me as many other varieties I've grown. The flavor was somewhat lacking. If you've never had a really good heirloom tomato, you might think Big Zac has good flavor....but once you know what a really great tomato tastes like, then BZ is a letdown.

The largest tomatoes I have ever grown have tended to be pinks and bicolors, and often those with a German background. The largest red tomatoes I have ever grown were called Spring Giant and we grew them when I was a kid. I have been toying with the idea of ordering Spring Giant seed from Sandhill Preservation Center and giving them a try. A lot of people try growing 'Deliciou' because, as you may know, the largest tomato ever grown was a 'Delicious' that was in excess of 7 lbs. and it was grown by a guy from Edmond. Unfortunately, nobody I know that has grown it has achieved a large size or a decent flavor with it.

Aunt Ginny's Purple tastes almost as good (to me) as Brandywine, and produces more fruit per plant.

Eva's Purple Ball produces smaller fruit than I had expected, but makes lots of them.....and they taste SO good!

Aunt Gertie's Gold will amaze you. Every tomato should taste this good.

Little Lucky and Lucky Cross are terrific tomatoes. They have proven to be very adapatable in my garden...growing fairly well in hideously wet conditions, making a good recovery from the excessively waterlogged soil, and thriving and producing tasty tomatoes once the rains stopped and the wicked heat/dryness set in. I can just imagine how well they will perform under "normal" weather conditions (if any of our Oklahoma weather can be described as "normal").

Brandy Boy is one of the few recently released hybrids that actually delivers great flavor and great performance as promised. (Bucks County/Little Brandywine is another.)

Sweeet Million is sweet and will give you a million tomatoes on monstrous plants that just won't stop growing or producing.

SunGold is really early--I get ripe ones from it roughly 50 days after transplanting, although I think its' labeled DTM is 57 days. They are tasty and mine don't usually crack or split unless Mother Nature sends torrential rains when the tomatoes are almost ripe.

Coyote has produced all summer in spite of the weather. The tiny tomatoes have a LOT of flavor, and it is a good flavor too!

Persimmon is one of the toughest, most drought and heat-tolerant varieties I have ever grown. It is very disease resistant, produces lots of tomatoes and they have a good flavor.

Super Sioux wasn't super for me, and never was Sioux. To be fair, though, I only grew them twice, and both years were excrutiatingly hot and dry. One of my 'old rancher' neighbors says Sioux was one of the best tomatoes he's ever grown.

Dawn

Hello all! Just to add my list to the mix! "Biggest tomato" and "best yield" (last year) was Mortgage Lifter grown from seed. I canned 50 pints of salsa from 3 plants. Wonderful flavor. This year was a bust for big ones but really enjoyed a Tumbling Tom in hanging pots. Had bunches of yellow cherrys but I know plants would not have survived if not for the wet year. When finally dried out here they almost died. I cut back and they have regrown and have blossoms. The tropical storm Erin took out rest of plants in my garden. Had 4 heirlooms dubbed "pineapple" tomatos. Think I got 1 tomato although plants were 8 feet tall caged. Such a waste of space. I have hot peppers coming out of my ears and that is all thats left. Had to buy case of tomatos to make salsa with my peppers! Will use lists here for next years seed purchase. Almost excited already. Laura Lea-Clayton

I lost my veggie garden this year from all the rains in June/July. It looked like a river, the tomatoes plants recovered from one onset but the plants did not make it when another one hit just as they where starting to dry out. :(

I don't have room for seeds, SO I just buy my tomato plants in stores, late April or mid May. (depending on weather) I use one Gal cans with the lids early in the year to help protect the young plants.

Hi Laura!

Mortgage Lifter was one of the first 2 or 3 heirlooms I grew when I started growing heirlooms back in the early 90s and I am very fond of it. Most years I have good yields and very tasty fruit from Mortgage Lifter, but every now and then it has a bad year. I think I may try Estler's Mortgage Lifter in the next year or two. It is different from the Mortgage Lifter commonly grown today, which was bred and sold by M. C. Byles.

My tomatoes in pots have struggled since the rains ceased too, even though I have tried to make sure they have enough water. They definitely were happier when it was wetter, cloudier and cooler.

I'm sorry to hear that Erin took out what was left of your plants. This has been a really hard year, weather-wise, for Oklahoma gardeners. I understand that the Farmer's Almanac 2008 edition hit the news stands today. I wonder what it is predicting for us for 2008? Of course, I am not saying their forecasts are accurate, although they claim an accuracy rate of 80 to 85%. Whatever weather we have in 2008, I don't know how it could be harder on us or any more bizarre than this year's weather.

I have grown several heirloom tomatoes with 'pineapple' in the name, and none of them have performed especially well. This year I was trying Black Pineapple, and the rains pretty much wiped it out. I might give it a try next year.....squeezing one in somewhere, just because I hate to give up on a variety based on one year's efforts.

We have peppers coming our of our ears, too, this year. The hots have outperformed the sweets, though. One day we'll have to have a thread on our favorite peppers!

I am almost getting excited about next year's garden too. I think one of the great things about growing your own veggies is that you get to make a fresh start 'next year'.

I do need to do a lot of soil improvement in my raised beds this fall and winter as the heavy rains seemed to leach out a lot of the nutrients this year.

Hi Kirts!

I lost parts of my garden to the heavy rains in the same way that you did. Even the raised beds that are 4" to 6" above the grade of the surrounding area had drainage problems. What can you do when you have water standing in your garden for weeks on end? (I guess we could have planted rice and had a good crop if only we'd known we would have a river running through the garden in 2007!)

I use various cans and buckets to protect new plants, too, right after they are planted in the ground. One of my neighbors uses white five-gallon buckets with the bottoms cut out of them in the same way. He just puts the lid back on the bucket if cold weather threatens. It works most years, unless his plants have grown up and out of the bucket and then a REALLY late freeze hits.

Veggie gardening has to be better in 2008....it is hard to imagine it could be worse. :)

On the other hand, we haven't had the horrendous wildfires in southern Oklahoma like we (and much of the rest of the state) had in 2005-2006.

I guess it is always something!

Dawn

Dawn,

I think you should definetly do a pepper list before next spring, and include a few tips for growing them too.

The Orange Oxheart is the one that was so whispy and I thought wasn't going to make it, now it is the most massive tomato plant that I have ever seen, now sporting 3 tomatoes, hehe. I know the ARGG are going to great, because everybody always brags on them, I need to learn to have some patience.

I am already excited for next years garden too. I have already made plans to set some tomato plants out in March and maybe try the walls o water.

Hi Sheri,

I hope that the new job is going well.

I'll start a new pepper thread in the next day or two. I like to do these kinds of threads in summer and fall so I can make my seed lists, and get those the seeds ordered either in fall or very early winter. I usually start my pepper and tomato plants from seed in January, about the time that many seed catalogues are arriving. Of course, new items in the catalogs always spark my interest, so I always end up ordering more seed even though I've already got plants growing under lights. :)

This week I made the "mistake" of looking at the websites for Victory Seed and Baker Creek Heirloom Seed....and, of course, there are some 'new' seeds there that I don't remember seeing last fall/winter when I ordered seeds for 2007. So, here I am reading the descriptions and asking myself "I wonder if I could find room for a couple of those......" So, you see, even though I tell myself that I have done enough experimentation and should just stick to the 'tried-and-true', I find it impossible to actually do so! :)

On the other hand, years of experimentation have given us the opportunity to try literally hundreds of varieties of tomatoes, and some of them have been real 'keepers'. Growing heirloom tomatoes then led me to growing heirloom beans, corn, peppers and melons, among others, so it is a wonderful journey. We have discovered the many wonderful flavors of the old veggies that were bred and passed down from gardener to gardener unlike so many 'modern' veggies (those bred since WWII, and esp. since about the 70s) that have been bred for their long shelf life in grocery stores and their ability to ship well. Granted, a lot of the modern hybrids do have disease resistance bred in and tested and verified....but I have found many heirlooms to be just as disease resistant and much more flavorful.

I think you might be pleased with Wall O' Waters. I had a neighbor in Fort Worth who always used them to get his tomatoes in the ground in early March. I can't use them here because my entire veggie garden is on a slope. I am thinking of building a couple of long raised beds north of the garage/barn and, if I do, I could use the WOWs there, because that land is flat. Unfortunately, it is also in an area the deer like to walk through in the winter and early spring, so we'd have to put up yet another fence.

Dawn

I'm a bit late to this thread. But I would mention that I grow Tuxhorn's Yellow and Red, an Indiana heirlom, which is pretty much a look-a-like to Hawaiian Pineapple. I first got the seed from a Mrs. Ed Tuxhorn, in Warsaw, Indiana, back in 1985. When we left the country for some years I sent seed to a number of Seed Savers Exchange members, and last year, I got some seed from one of them. It was crossed. Three out of four plants were not true to type. I saved seed from that one, and this year three out of four were true to type. The fourth is pink fruited, large and with a tough skin. I don't like it. But I'm hoping to select back to the true Tuxhorn's strain.

This isn't my favorite all round tomato because of it's large core. It's not much for cooking either. But it is tasty and produces impressively large tomatoes. I didn't know until coming to OK that it is also amazingly tolerant of heat. The plants didn't set much fruit during our 1 1/2 months of 100+ temps. But they didn't get sick or die either. Now, they are setting on plenty of fruit, once again.

George
Tahlequah, OK

George,

How many more generations of plants will it take to get your Tuxhorn's Yellow and Red back to what it ought to be?
Just a couple more?

I hope that we do not have an early frost this year.....so you can get lots of ripe ones off that plant. Tomatoes that make really large fruit never set well for me during the heat of the summer.....but they sure do make up for it when the cooler autumn weather returns!

All my tomatoes are covered in fruit and flowers now. If only it would rain here! (When it does rain, we get a paltry two-tenths or three-tenths of an inch, which doesn't do much good)

Dawn