Gary, Oh, I don't "think" you said enough to get yourself in trouble. I am sure the GW admin can distinguish between an innocent mention of one's livelihood versus blatant advertising. I am not sure how strongly the rule is enforced, but the rule as I understand it is that no commercial advertising is allowed in any of the forums. If you say something about your business that they think comes too close to advertising, I think they send you a "warning" by e-mail. Anyway, I'm glad you mentioned your operation. How else would someone like me down here in southern OK know you were up there in northern OK? I'm glad to know we have someone else up there (in addition to Lisa) growing heirlooms that we can refer people to when they're searching for plants or for information, answers to the hardest tomato questions, etc..... Maybe you cannot refer people here to your operation, but the rest of us can. There's a guy in Texas who sells heirloom tomatoes by mail but ONLY mails them within the state of Texas. (He has a real job and trying to mail them all over the country is too time-consuming for a part-timer.) I've always wished 'somebody' here in Oklahoma had that kind of business because lots of folks here want to try heirlooms and some people don't have the space to start seeds indoors or their job takes them out of town too much, etc. Finally, what would any of us do if a late freeze (or baseball-sized hail or a tornado or a wildfire) wiped out every plant we had in the ground in, let's say, early May? Would we be forced to grow only hybrids? Well, it wouldn't be the worst thing on earth, but it would be close. No. We'd send out an SOS and find someone in the state of Oklahoma who raises/sells heirlooms and we'd be hoping and praying we could find someone like that. So, you see, we NEEDED to know that you are there. Laspasturas, Welcome home to Oklahoma and also welcome to the Oklahoma forum. I'm glad you decided to stop lurking and start 'talking' to us. I read over your list and think most everything you have on it ought to grow just fine here. If there's one that might not produce well here, it likely would be German Red Strawberry since the heart types don't generally produce well in our endless and brutal summer heat. I grow indeterminates in containers and, in general, they perform quite well there. The larger the container, the better they perform. I grow indeterminates in containers of all sizes from cat litter buckets that seem slightly smaller than 5-gallon buckets (I've never measured to see how much the buckets hold but guess 4 to 5 gallons) to molasses feed tubs (about the size of a half-whiskey barrel, so I'm guessing 20 gallons or so?). To grow in containers here in OK, you have to pay careful attention to watering. In our hottest weather, and by that I'd say anything up to about 105 degrees, the containers may need to be watered twice a day. When the temp goes over 105, I drape old bedsheets over my containerize plants to shade them and then water them at meal times: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Luckily, that kind of heat usually only lasts a few days. Because Oklahoma's heat is so brutal, I try to strategically place my containers where the plants will receive 6 to 8 hours of direct sun and no more than that. I get better production from those plants than from containers placed to that they get sun for 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day. The plants also are happier if they are not lined up alongside a driveway, patio or south or west-facing wall that reflects a lot of heat up onto them. And, light-colored containers reflect heat away from the roots better than dark-colored containers do. AND, I spray-paint my kitty litter buckets a nice shade of green or blue (using Krylon Fusion paint designed specifically for plastics) so I don't look too much like a redneck gardener (not that there's anything wrong with being a redneck gardener). I don't think that your questions about how many tomatoes to grow for canning or dehydrating is a hijacking of the thread at all, but I am worried that people with a similar question in the future wouldn't find this thread if they do a GW search because the search feature here is a little squirrelly (with no dispect to our friends the squirrels). So, if it is OK with you, I'll start a separate thread about growing tomatoes for canning and drying and such in the hope that by putting the words canning and drying in the title, it will ensure future searches find that thread. I'll get busy on that thread after dinner. Dawn

Melissa, I put some transplants in the ground in late July or early August and still had fresh tomatoes late into the season. They were not abundant, the taste wasn't quite as good, and the cold weather hit pretty early last year. I my case, they were just left over transplants that had managed to live in their small pots with no care all summer. I just did it as an experiment. So my answer is yes, but I would try to have them in the ground by early July, I think. My guess would be that some years you might not succeed, but as seedmama says, "You can't win if you don't play". Here is a good example (of a bad example). I planted several crops in cups this year that I had planned to move to the garden when the weather settled a little. They were all cool season crops and have been outside for a long time. They endured a three inch rain, so I gave them a drink of fish emulsion. Although growing slowly, they were growing, EXCEPT the spinach. It grew to about one and a half inches, then set seed. So try as we may, sometimes mother nature works against us. I planted pole beans in late July last year and had a wonderful harvest, so I think if we plan to start our fall garden early, we can plant a lot of things. Leave your peppers in the ground all season if they still look healthy because although production may slow a little in summer they will likely rebound in fall. Tomatoes seem to wear out much earlier. My summer squash was productive into the fall, and my ONE melon vine produced for quite a long time. I planted a lot of winter squash (which I don't normally grow) and I got it in a little late for full maturity. The butternut finished, but the others needed a little more time. I actually could have left them on the vine longer, but I listened to the weather forecast and pulled them when they said frost threatened. It didn't happen here - - twice - -, so I could have gotten them much more mature. Of the tomato plants I have set aside for you, three are cheeries and include our favorite tomatoes. Sungold and Black Cherry are wonderful tomatoes and I am trying Ildi for the first time. I know your children will enjoy picking and eating Sungold right off the vine. It is super. They might even get a few into the house, but I doubt it. HeeHee Having said all of this, please remember that I have only lived here 8 years and some years didn't have much of a garden, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt (and a heavy duty prayer) and just use your best judgement. Carol

Hi Everyone! I could talk about tomatoes all day, especially when it is too hot to be outside! Patty, Large-fruited tomatoes (pretty much anything that makes tomatoes larger than ping pong balls) will bloom and set fruit (for the most part) only when daytime highs are lower than about 92 to 95 degrees AND nighttime temps are warmer than 55 but lower than 72. So, if you watch your temperatures every spring and fall, after a few years, you'll know by "how it feels outside" if your large-fruited tomatoes are going to set fruit or not. Some years in Oklahoma, that window of opportunity for fruit set is very small. Other years, it is better. This year, we went from "too cold" to "too hot" so quickly that a lot of people have had a disappointingly small OR late OR both fruit set. You WILL sometimes see flowers form at high temps and still not get fruit, and that is because the pollen gets sticky and won't move from one place to another within the flower. Shaking the plant or thumping the flowers sometimes helps you get fruit set in those cases. The foliage is ALWAYS beautiful in June. Partly it is because May and June usually have abundant rainfall, partly it is because diseases and insects haven't gotten to the plant yet, and sometimes it may be because the plant has been fed a high-nitrogen plant food. If nitrogen is giving you gorgeous foliage, it also is depriving you of fruit. As far as giving your plants the sunshine they need AND the shade that helps them survive the heat, I have found that my plants perform perfectly well, stay healthy, and produce plenty of fruit on only 6 to 8 hours a day. Since the sun comes up here at roughly 6:30 in the summer months, and sets at roughly 8 to 8:30, you could situate your plants where they get some shade from a fence, tree or building and it would help them more than it would hurt them, as long as they get 6 to 8 hours of sunlight. My favorite place to plant tomatoes gets sun from sunrise until about 2 or 3 p.m. and then gets some dappled shade from a large pecan tree. The section of the garden that gets shade from mid-afternoon on always produces more fruit later in the season, on both pepper and tomato plants, and I think it is because that late-afernoon shade helps them handle the heat. Also, with some shade, you're less likely to see sunscald on tomatoes, peppers, eggplant or melons. Ssimon, The heat-related fruit set problems I described above to Patty are probably why you have fruit on your cherry tomatoes, and there isn't much you can do about it except pray for a "cold front" to cool off your part of the state for a few days. The only way to beat the heat here in southern Oklahoma is to plant as early as is humanly possible, which for me means early March, about 3 weeks before our average last frost date. Once you plant early, you have to be willing to cover them up anytime the temps are going below 40 degrees (frost can form at 38 or 39 degrees if the conditions are just right). By planting early and protecting my plants, I usually get great fruit set, and am usually harvesting by late April. And, I have to emphasize, that getting ripe tomatoes by late April is my goal and everything I do is geared towards getting early fruitset. I also raise my own plants from seed, starting on Super Bowl weekend, and have very large, very healthy, very well-rooted plants by the time I set them out. THAT is the only way to beat the heat, because some years it gets too hot as early as May and greatly impedes fruit set. This May, we had a hard freeze at our house the first week of May, and then a couple of weeks later we had several days with high temperatures of 98 and 99 degrees. With weather like that, it is a wonder we have any tomatoes at all. For what it is worth, Black Krim and Cherokee Purple both USUALLY set fruit for me through mid-July, most years, and do set fruit later than many other tomatoes. This year has been odd, though, and neither of them is bearing as heavily as usual. Early blight is a perpetual problem in my garden, but not a huge problem. The more tomatoes you grow, the bigger a problem it is. I create most of my own problems by growing too many tomatoes, placed much too closely together. I do keep my plants pretty healthy by mulching heavily, organically amending the soil, watering with soaker hoses instead of an overhead sprinkler, etc. I do major companion planting and garden organically too, which helps. I'll always have some early blight, though, as long as I grow huge numbers of plants. This year, overall, if I were rating the current Early Blight problem on a scale from 1 to 10, with one being minor and ten being major, I'd say this year is a 1 or 2 so far. I have never lost a tomato plant to fusarian wilt or verticillium wilt, or to bacterial speck or spot, etc. I did lose one plant to southern blight in about 2000 or 2001, and lost one to curly top virus around 2003. I've never had trouble with Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl although it is has been found in Oklahoma (it is a devastating disease). Having early blight in our temperatures and humidity is not at all unusual and I can deal with it. I don't use chemical fungicides because they only buy you maybe 3 extra weeks of production and I just won't put chemicals on food we're going to eat, but that's just me. Everyone has to decide for themselves whether they are going to spray their plants for any problem, or not, and I am not saying my way is the best way--just that it is the method I have chosen. Mick, OK, you have me figured out. Somewhat. I have gardened my entire life (dad, uncles and grandparents were gardeners!) and the goal has always been to grow huge amounts of tomatoes to share with everyone we know. So, when I carry sackfuls of tomatoes to friends, family, neighbors, etc., I am just carrying on a family tradition. I HAVE really and truly cut back though. After we moved here, for the first time in my life I had all the room I needed to grow all the tomatoes we wanted. There was plenty of space to experiments with "new" ones. I have taken advantage of that to try many, many varieties in an effort to find the ones that (a) taste best and (b) grow best in our climate. Some years, I have had as many as 400 plants and 100 varieties. This year, it is about 70 varieties and a total of 140 plants for spring. In the fall, it will be fewer varieties and fewer plants, but still lots of them...and probably too many. For next year, I want to cut back to 50 varieties and 100 plants. Now that I know what grows here, and how well they do and how they taste, I am working on paring down the list to "the best" and "the most worthwhile". For a long time, tomatoes have dominated my garden and, even though I love tomatoes, I want to grow more of other stuff too. I gave up most cool-season crops like broccoli, spinach, cabbage and lettuce about 7 or 8 years ago because we couldn't keep the deer from devouring them in the late winter to early spring. Now that I have a deer-proof fence (so far!), I will be able to grow cool-season crops as well and that will take space away from the tomatoes. Will I ever go back to planting just a couple of varieties? Absolutely not. Heirloom and open-pollinated tomatoes make up the majority of my tomatoes and the only way I know to describe the flavor variations between them is to say that heirloom and OP tomatoes are like wines--every one has its own unique flavor. With hybrids, it seems that many (but not all) of them taste about the same as every other hybrid. And, while we are on the subject of wine, did you know that you can make wine from tomatoes? (I am a treasure trove of tomato trivia.) I would love to have two separate gardens, and be able to grow crops in one of them one year, and then rotate everything to the other garden the next year. In the "off" year, I could grow cover crops to enrich the soil, or cover and solarize the beds if needed. However, since I have brick-hard red clay that requires huge amounts of organic material to turn it into good soil, I don't think I'll ever have a second garden. It is hard enough to continually enrich and improve the existing garden. I don't practice very much crop rotation in my garden and, except for the problems with Early Blight, I don't seem to have any real problems that you could blame on a lack of rotation. But, since I don't rotate, I do work really hard in the "off-season" to put organic material and minerals back into the soil to keep it as healthy as possible. I have found that crop rotation is not AS necessary if you garden organically and work continually to put minerals and organic material back into the soil. Y'all, I picked well over 100 tomatoes today....but mostly cherry, grape and currant types. I think I only picked 8 or 10 or 12 "big ones". All those big tomatoes that have been green seemingly forever are starting to break color here, so if it is happening this far south now, then y'all should see it happening to your greenies in the next 10 to 14 days if not sooner. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Early Blight and Other Tomato Diseases

Jay, I am married to a former Pennsylvanian and he still has relatives there who garden and every summer I envy their cool temperatures (you know, they think 85 degrees is hot) and their usually abundant rainfall. When we go there to visit in summertime, everything is so lush and lovely that it blows my mind, especially compared to how roasting hot and tired everything looks in this part of the country at the same time. On the other hand, Late Blight seems to be on a tear there the last few years, so their beaufiful crops can fail suddenly. Marcy, That's a great list from the Kerr Center. Thanks for linking it. Susan, I think each of us adds/drops varieties for many reasons. After growing tomatoes for 25 years on my own and for at least 15 years with my dad prior to that, I'm just through with the massive experimentation. The truth is that out of every 20 or 25 new (to me) varieties that I try, maybe one or two is worth putting into the permanent growing rotation. So, rather than constantly looking for something new, I'm trying to refine the grow list and weed out those that perform least well in a broad range of conditions. I've reached the conclusion that there really aren't many, or maybe not any, incredible undiscovered varieties out there that taste/perform significantly better than what I've already tried....so I've stopped looking. I had high hopes for the Brandymaster series, likely because it is so tempting to believe there could be anything that could match Brandywine's flavor. They've performed so poorly here that I doubt I'd see a better performance next year or the year after. While many of you may be seeing significantly hotter or drier weather this year than in your average year, for us here in southcentral OK, our rainfall has been exactly 'average' for the year to date and so have our temperatures. If anything we've had slightly lower temperatures, in general, in Love County than we usually have although higher than average heat indices. So, for me, this is a pretty typical year except the real heat arrived in mid-May instead of late June so we got hot earlier, but not necessarily hotter than average...just earlier than average. A tomato variety that didn't perform well in what was a fairly typical year here at our place this year likely wouldn't perform any differently next year. In Oklahoma we have a wide range of average annual rainfall....some folks may average 15" of rainfall per year in western OK while others in eastern OK may average 50-60" or more. Humidity varies widely as does soil type and pH. So, what grows well for someone in highly alkaline soil and water in western OK may not grow nearly as well for someone in eastern OK with entirely different weather and soil. I enjoy looking at everybody's lists and hearing how different tomatoes perform for different people but I know that works well in areas drastically different from mine may not work well here. Growing in containers is much more complicated. First of all, nothing that I grow performs as well in containers as in the ground. Heat and pests hit container-grown plants much harder every year than those in the ground. The grasshoppers have completely stripped my container tomatoes of every leaf and fruit, but have only done sporadic damage to in-ground plants. It is the same thing with spider mites....only the container plants have had issues with them this summer. For me, container-grown tomatoes are great from Jan. or Feb. through the end of June or early July. After that, I might as well yank out those plants and toss them on the compost pile because they're toast. Last year, the tomatoes in containers did somewhat better than they usually do....but we had much higher than average rainfall and much more rain/clouds/cool weather than we see in an average summer. I'm looking for plants that perform best in the worst of conditions, not the best ones, because more often than not, we get the worst conditions every July and August. In containers, I plant tomatoes that can tolerate the heat and the restriction of their root growth and still perform. That means I often grow tomatoes in containers that I don't consider 'good enough' to plant into the ground....stuff like Better Bush and Husky Red Cherry. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm just at the point that I want what produces best for us here, and I don't want to keep looking for something 'better' because I don't think there is anything out there that's really that much better than our tried and true varieties that make our grow list most years. For a long time, I gardened for fun....trying any and every thing that interested me. We ate all we wanted fresh and gave tons away and didn't care if we put up much for the non-gardening season or not. In recent years, though, I've developed a deeper appreciation for the truly superior flavor of anything/everything that's grown locally and picked/prepared/preserved at its peak of perfection. Thus, I give away little and try to raise as much of our annual food supply as possible. In a good year I fill up three freezers, a root cellar and manage to can 2 or 3 or 4 hundred jars of 'stuff'. Since that is what is important to me now, I want plants that produce well, that provide tasty food we like and that are not prima donnas requiring a lot of pampering. Thus, I'm less inclined to experiment and more inclined to plant what produces really well with little fuss. In a lot of ways, the 'experimentation years' were a lot more fun, but the farm-garden-preserving years have been much more productive. Now my family is spoiled and I must produce as much home-grown food as possible because they don't like grocery store stuff as much as they used to. Even DS's firestation co-workers prefer fresh, home-grown and I'm going to try to plant a lot more for them next year so I can send them all the tomatoes, peppers and other yuummy things they're craving. There just isn't room, or enough improved soil, to experiment with varieties now as there used to be. I don't mind that, really, because as long as what I'm growing is producing well, I've gotten over thinking there are incredible varieties out there just waiting for me to find them. Megan, Black Plum grew very well for me for a long time and then for 2 or 3 years it didn't and I dropped it. It is odd how that happens....and I loved Coyote too. If my garden were twice as large as it is, I'd bring it back to the grow list. So many varieties, so little time (and improved soil). The tomatoes I grow from seed invariably outperform storebought ones and I don't know why, but I've seen it enough years to know it is true. Dawn