Sheri, I'm sure they were packed in. When I read the book, I was amazed at how many plants he had in a small space....and he was doing it in a colder zone than ours (Colorado). Tomato mania makes people do crazy things. Caspian Pink usually makes 5 or 6 feet in height easily before the killer summer heat slows it down and it really spreads OUT a lot too. After a while, it has grown so far beyond the cage that you cannot tell it even has a cage. By contrast, Cherokee Purple gets as tall in my garden, but not as wide and bushy. I think the duckies probably did greatly enrich the soil as they decomposed, so maybe that is why the spot seems to be a prime spot for growing tomatoes. I've had lots of blooms and fruitset, but the heat did slow everything down some I think. Now that the wind has backed off some (although I think it returns here either today or tomorrow), the plants are looking a lot better, and yesterday's inch of rain helped. One thing I have noticed this year that seems peculiar (maybe it is the weather) is that a lot of my plants have had more megablooms than usual. I know megablooms are common early in the growing season, but so far they continue to pop up here and there. (I guess if I was trying to grow giant competition/exhibition tomatoes, I'd be thrilled to have all the megablooms.) I have 5 paste tomatoes that have looked bad the last few days, and I finally realized they must have been hit by some Round-up drift when I was spraying the garden fenceline near them with Round-up to kill the bermuda grass that was trying to creep through the fence and into the garden. This week I am going to lay down cardboard and cover it with mulch along that fenceline, because I have a persistent bermuda grass problem there, and don't want to use Round-up again. I think the plants will recover as only the top few inches were affected. For some reason, all my Roma tomato plants are much larger than usual this year and I can't imagine why. They are in some of the worst soil in the garden, they were shaded by a willow tree that was growing on the banks of the retention pond at the northeast edge of the garden (DH cut that tree down Sunday), and they haven't gotten any special attention. I guess they thrive on neglect. In any season, I have found that tomato plant varieties can behave completely differently from what they did the year before, and can even behave differently from another plant of the same variety planted right next to them. When I comment on that, my DH reminds me that plants are like children--each one is a unique living creature, and that each sibling in a human family is different from the others, just like the plants. He has a good point! Dawn

Ilene, I've been wondering where you'd been! I agree with you. I do think there is a big climate difference between extreme southern Oklahoma and northern Oklahoma, especially northeastern Oklahoma. For starters, we are are the 'sunny side of the Arbuckles', though you can't tell much difference this year! I think we get a little hotter, perhaps, in late July and early August of some years. Our first year here we had a string of 110 to 115 degree days in early August that lasted about a week, and I was ready to pack up and move back to Texas, where it 'only' gets to about 105, maybe 106 on very hot days. Most of the time y'all have higher humidity and higher rainfall. Y'all also have generally better soils and colder winters. We have earlier springs most years, and we have occasional days in January through March where the temps spike up into the 80s and even the 90s, which will make us think it is spring even though it is not. I don't know if your winter temps are as erratic as ours, or if they are more consistently winter-like? I think our frost-free growing season is a few days longer than yours, but not much. We do get away with pushing the envelope as far as planting early, because our late cold spells tend to be briefer and not as cold as your late cold spells. If you are familiar with the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and its weather, ours is very, very similar to theirs--only slightly hotter in the summer and slightly colder in the winter. As far as whether you are a Yankee or not? I don't think so! I have to admit though, that when I was growing up in Texas, it was generally accepted that everyone who was NOT from Texas was, in fact, a damn Yankee! Now just find a single person in Texas who was even born in Texas! The Yankees have all moved south and become Texanized. Ilene, I was pinching back the lemon and lime basil earlier today because they are trying to flower and I am trying to stop them. I could pinch back basil all day--it smells so good. I have a big pot of tomatoes on the stove boiling down so I can make spaghetti sauce for dinner. In a few minutes I am going to run out to the garden and pick some Italian large leaf basil and some parsley to use. Yum. I am just like you--tired of the rain but afraid to say so out loud for fear I will jinx us and the rain will totally stop. It has happened to us before--we have gone from a VERY wet spring to a July and August where virtually no rain fell, and it is amazing how quickly the moisture in the ground dissipates! I hope they are careful with their water releases so your area doesn't have to deal with more flooding. Your little old lady friends sound so precious and sweet--I always liked the Baldwin sisters. When I was growing up we had a lot of older ladies like them and they got me addicted to gardening. I remember them working out in their yards and gardens wearing cotton housedresses in lovely floral prints, and very sensible shoes, and big straw hats, and very proper gardening gloves of course. I may be more comfortable in my jeans, T-shirts, baseball cap and hiking boots as I work in the garden.....but I don't look like a 'southern lady gardener' the way they used to! We've been fighting the grass too as it attempts to take over the world, especially in the beds where all the 'prety' stuff grows. It seems like all we do is mow and weedeat lately, in between rain showers, of course. I hate to say it, cause I'll jinx us, but not a drop of rain has fallen at our place today. There--I went ahead and said it--now it will probably start pouring down rain at any moment. :) I need to go gather some herbs. Talk to you all laer. Dawn

I'm glad you're having a great tomato year. If I was guessing, I'd think the weather has been the biggest contributing factor, though the changes to your soil probably also helped. No matter how good my soil is, the weather and how early I get the plants in the ground largely determine what sort of tomato year it will be. You know, you can have the best soil in the world, but once the temperatures are high enough to impede fruit set, which can happen as early as early to mid-May in a hotter/drier than average year like 2011, then most tomato plants stop setting fruit period. So, when the weather allows for lots of fruit set, you've got to give the weather the credit. If you're liking the flavor better, though, then you probably could give the soil credit for that. I generally have not grown Heidi and Viva Italia in the same year, so I don't know that I can tell you how to tell them apart because I think it would be hard to just look at the plants or fruit and know which is which. I always label my plants and make a map that shows the location of each plant by variety name in the garden. I do both on the day they are planted before something happens to the plant labels/tags. Based on my experience with my soil and my weather here in whichever years I have grown either of them, (and yours may not be the same), I think Heidi plants get a foot or maybe 18" taller than Viva Italia and Heidi is less prone to BER in a very dry and very hot year when it is hard to keep the soil evenly moist. The fresh flavor of Viva Italia is more pleasing to my taste buds, but I don't grow either variety for fresh eating---only for canning. I do think that in most years, Viva Italia has been less prone to foliar disease than Heidi, but then I wasn't growing them in the same year, so it is hard to compare since our weather is so variable from one year to the next. Viva Italia pumps out relatively uniform fruit, and some years you see more variation in the shape of Heidi's fruit (but not always) so that might or might not be a way to tell them apart in any given year. Now, here's something interesting---I am moving more and more away from growing paste tomatoes or even from growing Principe' Borghese for drying just as you are achieving success with them. It is more about my evolution as a canner than as a gardener. Over the years, I have gotten to where I prefer the flavor of salsa and pasta sauce made from a wide variety of heirloom slicers and beefsteaks to that of salsa and pasta sauce made with paste tomatoes. Of course, it matters less with salsa since the predominant flavors are those of the peppers and spices and the tomato is just the base flavor. The flavor of a blend of many heirloom tomato varieties is just so superior to the flavor of any paste tomato that I don't even use paste tomatoes in sauce any longer, only in salsa or for sun-dried tomatoes. This year I planted the smallest number of paste tomatoes ever--I think I put maybe 24 to 26 paste plants in the ground versus about 80 non-paste plants. I already had canned at least 160-170 pints of salsa (yes, that's a lot but we give it as gifts to a ton of people at Christmas time) made from blends of slicers, beefsteaks, hearts and cherries before we even got our first ripe paste tomato. If I'd had to wait for the paste types to get busy and produce ripe fruit, I'd just have started making salsa in the last 10-12 days and likely would be sweating it out in the kitchen for all of July. Instead, I am almost done with the tomato canning and am contemplating yanking out the paste types this week after I harvest one more round off of them. It isn't entirely their fault they are so late---they were the last two rows of plants I planted this year and then they got hit by herbicide drift a couple of times, so they have had to struggle to survive. With a pronounced lack of rainfall and with the real summer heat now here, I have no desire to keep watering plants I don't really need. I used to love Principe' Borghese for drying, except for the fact that they are so small and take forever to slice in half before I dehydrate them. It probably isn't a big issue in a small garden with only a couple of PB plants, but my garden is large and I usually plant a lot of PBs, or at least I used to. After the summer of 2012 when I could spend 6 to 8 hours a day picking only PB and nothing else, I told myself I'd let that variety go and only grow larger varieties for drying simply as an efficiency measure. Because I can, freeze and dehydrate so many different crops and not just tomatoes from our large garden, it got to where PB just slowed me down too much. I have to find ways to grow, harvest and preserve food more efficiently or I'll never get to sleep, so the little tomatoes that are time-consuming to process are out. We never liked them as fresh eating tomatoes anyhow since it took dehydrating to bring out their flavor, so we won't miss them much---there's plenty of other varieties to dry that won't be so time-consuming to pick and slice. I started trying varieties that produce larger, meatier paste type fruit after I started using BrokenBar's recipe for wine-marinated sun-dried tomatoes. They're so delicious to eat, so I started looking at her grow lists of big, meaty paste types that she used to make sun-dried tomatoes and have tried several of them. Processing the larger fruit is so much more efficient, so now I am dropping the varieties that produce smaller paste or plum types in favor of those that produce larger ones to use for the marinated SDTs. Next year I plan to plant even fewer paste tomato plants, and I can see the time coming where I won't plant many of them at all. If it is all about flavor, they cannot compete with the heirloom slicers and beefsteaks, and I'd like to find more hearts that do as well here as Brad's Black Heart, so I probably will start trying more of them. I've been trying lots of paste varieties that are new to me from Marianna's Heirloom Seeds that produce significantly larger fruit and have been pretty happy with some of those varieties as they produce fruit that is much larger than that from Heidi or Viva Italia. Whichever paste varieties I keep growing in the future likely will include some of these bigger varieties. I really like Speckled Roman because it does produce huge fruit that's easier/quicker to pick and process. Brad's Black Heart has produced huge fruit this year, including some doubles, and I like the meatiness of Dolly Parton tomatoes. I love Cherry Falls and it has done equally well in the ground or in containers, so I hope you try it again. It has been a long time since I grew Tiny Tim and it was severely lacking in flavor and didn't produce very well, so wouldn't grow it again even if someone paid me to grow it. It is just as waste of space in our garden. Cherokee Purple is great, and I like the closely-related Indian Stripe even better. It is slightly more productive and the fruit seems a little larger than CP most years, so if I had to choose only one of them to grow, I'd only grow IS. Luckily, I don't have to choose only one, so this year I grew Cherokee Purple, Cherokee Purple Heart, JD's Special C-Tex, Indian Stripe and Indian Stripe Burson. I'd hate to have to choose only one of those, but if I had to, I'd choose JD's Special C-Tex because it has the same great flavor as the others, but normally produces larger fruit and produces slightly earlier. It also has the best heat tolerance of them all. My JD's Special C-Tex often sets fruit deeply into July, long after the CP's have been shut down by the onset of our usual summer heat. Pruden's Purple, though, has flavor just as good as any of the ones I just listed, and I only planted two Pruden's Purple plants this year and wish I'd found space for more. So, there you have it----that is why my grow list is so long every year---why grow only Cherokee Purple when there's so many other similar ones that also have great flavor? It is a good thing your garden is small because once you fall in love with the flavor of great varieties, it is easier to grow more than you need and more than you ever could want. I plead guilty to doing that every year, and it is only possible to do that because my garden is too big, which allows me to overplant everything. So, a smaller garden does, by necessity, keep a gardener from planting too many plants. That is not a bad thing. Dawn

Thanks Dawn. I thought I had asked that question before but couldn't find it. Now the worse part of the story is that I think I have 43 kinds of tomato seed and I don't have any of those five. LOL I think I will just look for one of them. I have Thessaloniki which is listed as a 60-80 day tomato, but it didn't get a good report from Jay. I think I may have a couple more that are supposed to be in the 65 day range. Most people here shoot for a 4th of July date, I think. I was much earlier that that one year, but most years that seems to be about right. I am hoping to try to hit a real early date with 2 or 3 plants. I have some plans of how I plan to accomplish that. LOL It has been very cool here several nights and I have some brown leaves on some okra and one tomato plant that happened over night a few nights ago. They are on the end of the row that gets more wind straight across them, but I am not sure that it is cold damage because the other plants next to them are fine. I still have a lot of peppers on my vines but the cooler weather seems to have slowed them down some. The green beans are still going strong. In the last week, the cole crops have started to stand up better and growing faster, so this seems to be just the kind of weather they really like. My cowpeas didn't make at all and I doubt that they will have time since the Tulsa station is saying that they could get a frost as early as the weekend and I'm a long way north of them. Sometimes I get a couple extra weeks because of the lake, but this year I am sure the lake has been cooling down slowly as the temps have gone lower over a longer period of time. They made pretty vines and have bloomed the last couple of weeks but I haven't seen any pods. I plan to check them carefully tomorrow and see if there is anything at all. I just got them in much too late because I assumed we would still have a lot of hot weather in August and September. Some of the winter squash that I planted late is probably going to be OK. I have not pulled any because last time I checked, I could still press my finger nail into it but they have colored up good. I think I will get a couple of acorn type and quiet a few butternut. The spaghetti squash was what I was most interested in getting but I doubt that it will make it. It is growing really fast now but will not reach it's 100 days until the end of October and I think we will have a freeze before that, for sure. Oh well, I got the seed in a trade and it was an experiment anyway since I knew there was a chance that it wouldn't have time to mature from my late planting. I drove back over to Baker Creek and took my friend and they had a sale on their 2009 seeds but they are very picked over by this time of year. They are beginning to put out several 2010 seeds, and they told me the catalog would be sent out in December. I have never had their catalog so I am looking forward to getting one this year. I'm not sure why because I have already bought all of my seeds for the next year.....and then some, but it will be fun to look at. Since I have about 100 packs of their seed, maybe I can use the catalog as a planting guide. LOL My DH is having a problem with a knee and he didn't go with us but Anna and I had a good time anyway and enjoyed the seed store. She bought Jonathon apples, green beans, and sweet potatoes from the vendors, and about 30 packs of seed. I looked for silkies but they didn't have any today. I probably will not go back until the May festival. That is a big 2 day thing and should be great, but since they had 6,000 people this year and the event gets bigger every year, I am sure you would need a motel reservation many months earlier. We left home at 7 today, did all our shopping and had lunch at their little place, and were home at 3 o'clock. I had already bought so many seed, but I was there....and the price was right....etc, etc, etc. I bought several things that I probably would not have selected otherwise. I notice that I got home with a lot of pink tomatoes and several new squash, and of course a lot of other things I didn't need. I did buy Ilinni Star tomato and Collective Farm Woman melon which I have wanted to try, and a few new squash.