Sammy, I don't have a greenhouse, although it is on my "wish list". Maybe one of these days. I start my seeds in 72-cell flats on Super Bowl Sunday and grow the seedlings under lights for about 4 to 5 weeks before I start moving them outside for part of each day to harden off. My light shelf is just one of those assemble-it-yourself plastic shelving units you buy at a place like Lowe's or Home Depot. I use ordinary shop light fixtures with plain old fluorescent lights. I leave the lights on for 12 hours a day, more or less. The light fixtures are on a chain and the chain is attached to hooks that DH screwed into the bottom of each shelf. Using the chains, I can raise and lower the height of the lights as needed. This is very important as you want your light source as close to the plants as possible without actually touching the plants. Keeping the lights very close to the plants keeps the young plants from stretching and getting leggy. When it is time to harden off the seedlings, I give them 1 hour of outside time the first day, 2 hours the second day, etc. I am careful to put them in a location that is completely sheltered from the wind because too much wind can cause windburn and windburn will kill the plants in the same way sunburn will. After a week of gradually lengthening exposure to outdoor conditions, the plants are hardened off and ready to go into the ground. Now comes the tricky part.... Just because the plants are ready to go into the ground does not mean the weather is going to cooperate with me and the calendar. So, sometimes I carry them outside every day for a couple of weeks before the weather is cooperative enough for me to plant them in the ground. And, if worse comes to worse and a major cold spell settles in for several consecutive days and the plants have to spend all those days inside, then they lost their "hardened off" status and I have to start all over with the hardening off process. Down here in extreme south-central OK, with an average last freeze date of March 27th, I like to get my plants in the ground between March 5th and March 27th, and the earlier the better. Is it risky? Yes. Sometimes we have sleet or snow after I have planted and, in that case, I cover up the plants and hope for the best. The same is true of cold nights--early planting means you must be diligent about covering up the plants on any night that it might possibly go below 40 degrees. Frost, after all, can form at 38 or 39 degrees if all the other conditions are just right. Planting early is the key to having plants in bloom and setting fruit before the temperatures get hot enough to impede fertilization. Because I am a tomato maniac, I also plant 4 to 8 plants in containers in the late Feb. to earliest March timeframe, and carry them into the very well-insulated barn every night, and back outside every morning. Using this method and using tomato plants purchased in Dallas in 6" pots the minute they arrive at Lowe's or Home Depot, I generally have my first ripe tomato between April 20th and May 1st. This is possible only because the plants I buy are about 10"-15" tall and in bloom when I buy them. I cannot even explain how important these first early tomatoes are and how much we enjoy them. I could raise the early plants myself, but to get them to the size they are when I purchase them, I'd have to start the seed around Nov. 1st and the holidays are too busy as it is. I think that tomato seedlings transplant best when they are 6 to 8 weeks old. Anything older than that and they suffer more transplant shock. And, even though I advocate early planting, there is no point in doing it if the soil is still very cold because they won't grow in cold soil. Instead, they'll just sit and sulk until the ground warms up. In Feb. and Mar. I check the Mesonet soil temperature data daily and then, when it is in the right range in my county, I go out with my thermometer and check the soil in my beds to see if it is warm enough. With early planting in the ground, if I am able to keep the plants from freezing to death or suffering freeze damage, even my in-the-ground plants will give me ripe tomatoes before Memorial Day, which is at least a month earlier than my gardening neighbors can even hope to have a ripe tomato. One of my "old farmer" neighbors tried for 7 or 8 years to "beat me" by having the first ripe tomato and finally decided it couldn't be done. LOL (I'm not competitive--I just want to have ripe tomatoes to eat as early as possible!) Some years, after we've eaten the first 3 or 4 earliest tomatoes, I'll give the next couple to my "old farmer" friend because I know he and his wife are as hungry for a garden-fresh tomato as we are, and they probably won't have ripe ones until mid- to late-June. If I am very, very careful with my spring plantings and am able to carry the tomatoes deep into fall, we eat ripe tomatoes at our house from April through late November or early December, and sometimes into January if I have late keepers. In the winter months, we have "oven dried" tomatoes to toss into salads or to use in cooking, and some years I can and make sauce. I'd rather have the tomatoes fresh, but canned, dried or frozen ones are still better than the garbage that grocery stores call "tomatoes". Right now, in fact, I have a big pot of tortilla soup on the stove and I can't wait to eat it. When I harvest onions in June, I chop up a ton of them and freeze them in zip-lock bags and I do the same with peppers. So, when it is time to cook, all I have to do is open up a few zip-lock bags and pour the stuff into the pot. Right now, I still have a lot of onions, tomatoes, peppers and corn in the freezer. By about Feb. or early March, though, I am counting the ziplock bags left in the freezers, and hoping we have enough home-grown stuff to last until we can harvest again. Dawn

Well after more thought I am thinking that my problem might be due to the amount of sun the plant is getting. One plant is about 5-6 feet tall and not terrible wispy the other plant seems to be getting allot more shade (new spot this year for the container trying to sqeeze in an extra plant). I also attribute the leaves to me not using trays this year on my containers and letting them sit on the mulch. I think on the sitting on the mulch they may not drain quite as well and are retaining allot more water. Even though we are getting the heat 90+ I am going to try and water every other day instead of every day with 1/2 to 1 gallon of water a day and see if that helps. I have been reading of so many differetn heirlooms I want to try next year I have not decided on if mortage lifter will be in the top or not. Depends on the taste I guess.

Ohio, I define what many call DTM's, as follows: Early, 55 to 65 days Midseason 65 to 80 days Late season , more than 80 days, There are those seasons when my late seasonones have ripened before the midseason ones and the mid season ones before the early ones, that's all about the variables I mentioned above. So no one should pay attention to a DTM of say 75 days, for instance, b/c that's kind of ridiculous IMO. I list ML in my book and call it late midseason, and that's the Radiator Charlie one. I just looked in one of my SSE YEarbooks and for both Estler and Radiator Charlie, the DTM's given are from 80 to 85 days and that depends on where a person gardens, in a geograpic sense and what specific year it was grown, which is not given since many SSE listers keep listing the same as long as they have viable seeds to fill requests with. Carolyn

http://t.tatianastomatobase.com/wiki/Mortgage_Lifter Edie, there are many here who believe that it was Radiator Charlie Byles who first developed Mortgage Lifter and it was Jeff McCormack at SESE who recorded that story and published it in his catalog and website and it became widespread. The history behind the Radiator Charlie story I linked to above and all it needs is to be cut and pasted as a link by anyone who wants to or go to Tania's wonderful tomato data base to read it. Below I've linked to the history of the Estler one. Chuck Wyatt, who passed away in June of 2002, was a good friend of mine and he was sent information from the Estler family claiming that his family bred it before Charlie did. At another message site there's a good thread about this as I recall, but GW does not allow for other message sites to be linked to or presented here, so I'll go ahead. There were newspaper clippings that were sent to Chuck that confirmed that Estler was the first to develop what was called Mortgage Lifter and that's in the link below. Chuck sent me seeds for it and I've grown it several times and prefer it over any other Mortgage Lifter I've grown, for there are other so called strains, which really aren't strains at all, they just have the name of the person who first SSE listed it attached to it. The Estler one I prefer b'c it's smoother and I think has better taste. I'm not sure there's any story here but please accept my condolences on his passing and I'm going to share this with others at other message sites. Carolyn Here is a link that might be useful: Mortgage Lifter, Estler