I found your seed list trying to find a source for 'big month', which a friend of mine grew last year and really liked but didn't save seed from and now can't find a commercial source for. I'm personally interested in 'green giant'. I love green tomato juice. So far I've grown 'green zebra' (which did fairly well), 'emerald evergreen' (which performed terribly), and 'Aunt Ruby's German green' (which was probably the best of the three.) Do you have a favorite green-when-ripe tomato you can recommend? I've read high praise for the 'green giant'. Feel free to contact me if you think I might have anything you'd be interested in trading for. I don't have any of the tomato varieties you're looking for, but I have a few tomato varieties you don't have. I would particularly note San Marzano redorta and Polish linguisa which are very similar, very large/long extremely meaty paste types. They're a very tasty fresh eating tomato but my family's very first choice for canning whole, for sauce, for roasted tomatoes, for paste, etc.

Mitch, You need to drive down for a visit in late May or July. Probably late May is best...because by then everything looks really spectacular and the diseases haven't arrived yet. June is a terrific month to see it too, but we have oodles of family birthdays and other family occasions that month so we're hardly ever home in June.. Of course, if this drought continues (and I cannot let myself believe it will) at the current level, there won't be much to see. I used to plant many more tomato plants than I do now--back in the early 2000s. At that point, the deer had not yet discovered the garden, so I could plant a couple of hundred plants outside the fenced-in garden, and the deer and rabbits hardly touched those unprotected plants. Now that we've been here a while, the deer, rabbits, raccoons and every other wild thing (including bobcats) like to get into the garden and feast. The first three are eating plants, but the bobcat is looking for birds or animals, including my cats. Since the wild animals found the garden, I now have to restrict myself to only what I can plant inside the fenced garden, so I'm only going to grow about 1/4 the number of tomatoes that I grew the first few years here. That's OK, though. I grow far too many anyway (although I don't have any trouble giving the extras away). I have had a great time trying new tomatoes, and I guess I'll never stop. I love many of the heirlooms, but the last couple of years, I've been trying a lot of fantastic hybrids from the Harris-Moran Seed Co. (and others) and I've been impressed with their flavor. I still grow a mix, but in hard years (when I expect drought), I grow a higher percentage of hybrids because they tend to produce more tomatoes per plant in many cases. Dawn

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

Tomsato, The very best San Marzano variety I have ever found is called San Marzano Gigantica. I have tried "Super" and "Redorta" as well as others and actually ran a side by side grow out comparison of 4 varieties in the late nineties. The seeds came to me as some left overs in a commercial packet from a German seed company in about 1995 from a gentlemen who now represents Franchi Sementi here in the US. I also garden in zone 6 with one garden in Beaver Falls, PA and another in Negley, Ohio. My experience in both locations is a prolific yield of 2.5 to 3" long fruits on rampant indeterminate vines. Unfortunately, every year there remains a very large quantity of greenies which fail to ripen by the first frost. I actually think this variety would be better maybe in Kentucky or South but the yield is more than satisfactory in zone 6. I have a few seeds I could send you, but I think you'd be better off waiting till next year to try them. Contact me via e-mail if you are interested (see my member page).