All of my tomatoes have been OP, so I can't vouch for the hybrids. I'll second the motion for oxhearts, they have found a permanent place in my garden. Some of the best eaten fresh too, and very few seeds. "Hungarian Heart" and "Sojourner South American" are both very good, and high-yielding. Very similar would be the "banana" types. They are elongated paste tomatoes with pointed ends, larger & later than most pastes, and with fewer seeds. "Federle" and "Gilbert Italian" are two of the best. Really good for salsa too, since they tend to ripen along with the peppers in late summer / early autumn. "San Marzano" can be good, but there are many strains out there using the same name, some of which are inferior - it's a crap shoot. Your best bet is one of the named strains, such as "Super Marzano" or "San Marzano Redorta". There are _hundreds_ of other "paste" tomatoes out there, with great variations in quality. Checking with your local Extension agent, or Master Gardeners, might give you a list of the best cultivars for your area. Or, you can just try 1 or 2 new ones each year. Many of the smaller, otherwise unremarkable tomatoes can make great sauce; it depends on your taste, and what the sauce will be used for. One I grew last year, "Landis", made a surprisingly good sauce. And the acid/sour tomatoes can actually be preferable when you want a strong flavor, or as a blend with sweeter tomatoes. I agree with those who shy away from the yellows; I haven't had much luck with them either. They usually are either too sweet, or tasteless. I did find one heirloom, "Yellow Pasta", that makes a wonderful, deep-yellow sauce with a sweet but rich flavor. I hope to make a good yellow ketchup from it next year. No one has yet mentioned the purple or "black" tomatoes; they are strong, often with fruity, unusual flavors. I haven't tried canning them as sauce yet, but they cooked down to a rich, dark broth in several dishes prepared by the spouse.

Hi Dale!!!! How are you? Long time no see. I hope the business is doing great. I always was a horrible typist, but I did start out as a 'stenographer' at General Dynamics in the earliest 1980s. Even though they hired me for my shorthand (140 words per minute, I'm proud to say), I mostly typed and this was back when we had to type on IBM Selectric typewriters and and then had to learn to type on computers (called word processors at the time) and I hated them. LOL In the mid-1980s we had to start using a brand new (in the business world) process called 'Electronic Mail' on our brand new computerized word processors and I didn't like it either and could not see its' worth, which just goes to show that I am not good at spotting trends! So, I guess I've been typing a long time but never especially liked it...and didn't stay a stenographer long either, promoting out of secretarial work and into first a personnel administrative job and then later an accounting job before I quit my job in the early 1990s to do the whole stay-at-home-mom thing. I then spent the rest of the 1990s and even the earliest 2000s avoiding computers because I had my fill of them at work all those years. After we moved to a fairly remote, rural area ihere in Oklahoma in the late 1990s, I eventually had to learn to like my computer and communicate on it in order to stay in touch with what was going on in the real world. Now, of course, I cannot imagine my life without electronic communication. I do always write long threads, though, and that's just me trying to be thorough and complete and cover all the bases. Hope you're well and looking forward to another great garden year. Dawn

Susan, I started doing square foot gardening in the mid-1990s and it works really well for some things and not as well for others that get really large in our climate. My spacing that I use now is sort of a hybrid of spacing from Square Foot Gardening and from John Jeavons' "How to Grow More Vegetables....." book, which has a complete title about as long as the distance between Marietta and OKC. I've just experimented with the spacing until I find out which one gives me the best yields. I think Square Foot Gardening would be great for you, but encourage you to think of it as Cubed Foot Gardening and grow as many plants upright on trellises, cages or arbors as you can and you'll get even higher yields per square foot. With smaller plants like lettuce, onions, carrots, etc., the standard Square Foot Gardening spacing works fine. With larger plants that turn into monsters in our climate, like Indeterminate tomatoes, squash, etc., I go more with John Jeavons' spacing or space my plants even further apart. With peppers, it generally varies, depending on whether a given variety gets 2' tall or 4' tall or taller. I have found most peppers give a really high yield even with close spacing, and so do many determinate tomatoes. I see Lunas most years in April, but not every single year. I usually don't see them in a bad fire year, but I'm not sure if that's because they aren't "here" or if I am just gone so much during a bad fire season that I miss seeing them when they are here. At our house, I almost always see them either on the ground in the area under the big security light that lights up the garage/parking area or hanging around outside the plant shelf window. When I see them at the fire station, it usually is early in the day and they're normally lying on the ground near the security light that illuminates the front of the station. I've never seen the larvae, but we have acres and acres of woods so they could be anywhere. We have tons of native pecans and hickories scattered all over our property (and on the surrounding acreage as well) so I guess that explains why we see them pretty regularly here. When I was a kid, they'd hang out on the front porch, usually on the screen door, when we were playing in the yard in the evening. It seems like we saw them a lot more often back then than we see them now. We have every kind of wildlife you can imagine here (as you well know) and most of it is a pleasure to have around. Seeing the lunas, because of their relative rarity, is a real thrill. Dawn

Here is my list. I already have my seed. I will be starting them mid/late March, and investing in wall-o-water cold protectors so I can set them out a bit early. I may leave out one of the glacier/manitoba/moskovich varieties, but we'll see. Beefsteak Aunt Ruby's German Green * (cutworms got my plant last year) Big Rainbow Black Krim Black Sea Man * Brandywine, Sudduth's Strain Cherokee Purple Kellogg's Breakfast Northern Lights Striped German Sunset's Red Horizon Medium Black Prince Black Zebra * (cutworms got my plant last year) Druzba Earl of Edgecombe * Eva's Purple Ball Flammé Glacier Green Zebra Japanese Black Trifele * Manitoba Moskovich New Girl * Peche Jaune Pink Ping Pong Purple Calabash Shimmeig Striped Hollow Stupice Valencia Cherries Black Cherry Green Grape Principe Borghese Cherry Tomato Sun Gold Washington Cherry * White Cherry * Plum/Paste Andes * Debarao * Opalka * Orange Roma Purple Russian * Russian Big Roma * San Marzano Wonder Light * New to me this year