Thanks for the check-ins. riceke: please let me know if you notice any sort of pest pattern with your tomatoes. I'm just curious as they were all put in around the same time but at different growth stages. Dave: The Big Boys are from seeds I collected a couple of years back and were the babies of the group and got caught in a surprise cold snap. They're doing fine although a little delayed. The Celebrity has a couple of fruit but is constantly under bug attack and you're right, it appears to be the least healthy of the group. Any observations are really appreciated. Thanks y'all!

Dear Dave, When I say 'everything else' I mean I have found other vegetables that are open-pollinated - such as cucumbers, beans, lettuce, etc. that produce (and taste) good in my climate (often better than their hybrid counterparts). I just have not found any open-pollinated tomatoes that produce a decent amount of slicing tomatoes. You are right in saying that climate is my biggest handicap. Some hot climates that do not experience freezes over the winter can grow tomatoes over the winter but those of us that have very hot summers (105F + day and 80+ at night) yet still experience freezing temps in the winter are often stuck with tomato plants that produce very little - if anything or with growing a few hybrid varieties. What I do to adjust for the climate is the following: 1. I plant my tomatoes in a lowered garden (lower does equate to slightly cooler) 2. I grow tall shading plants on the West side (the sun is hottest and causes the most problems for tomatoes in the later afternoon). 3. I plant my tomatoes far from walls or other sources of radiant heat. 4. I water every 2-3 days with a soaker hose for 2 hours to encourage deep root growth (When I used to water every day I would have lots of disease and very few tomatoes). 5. I provide my plants with non-water soluble nutrients early in the season (near the plant) so that fertilizing does not occur during the greatest period of heat. 6. I provide a 2 foot deep bed that is full of rich organic material. I am sure I could do something else, but this is all I can think of for now. I believe the kind of tomato cultivar I am looking for most can be called vigorous determinate (something small with a lot of dense foliage) that can produce tomatoes in the heat. Though my Siletz plants seemed to fit everything I am looking for (including production), the fruit exhibited a lot of BER - just like some of dwarf varieties I have trialed. As there is plenty of calcium in my soil I attribute the BER to some factor related to the root system of particular cultivars. A friend of mine that grew Siletz in a much cooler climate also had problems with BER only on the Siletz.

Yes, Planted it with moist soil and soil is moist whenever I check. The plant receives about 3 hours direct sunlight ( I did this so that during the summer all my plants wouldn't be scorched for 8+hours in Florida)

Seed Saver's Exchange has a wonderful history and what is so unique about it is that its members have saved so many varieties over the last several decades just because individual members took it upon themselves to save varieties, multiply the seed supply and share those seeds among themselves. You can obtain seeds from SSE in two ways: 1) through their public catalog that offers just a tiny portion of what is available; or 2) by paying a membership fee and joining SSE, which then gives you access to all the varieties listed by members in the annual yearbook. For those varieties, you contact the member directly and obtain the seeds from them for a small cost. The thousands and thousands of varieties that can be obtained that way is mind-boggling. They have participated in the international seed bank (Svalbard Global Seed Vaul)t, an effot to bank some of each kind of seed in the world in order to save/preserve all varieties for the future. In recent years, SSE has had some issues, most noticeably a bad marital breakup between the founders of the organization, which led to one member leaving----and he did not go in a quiet and peaceful manner. That was an unpleasant part of their history but shouldn't diminish the important of the work the SSE has done for decades. Our own George (MacMex) and his wife, were involved in the SSE for a very long time and now their work with the Green Country Seed Savers carries on their work in seed preservation at a regional level. Many modern hybrids (of all types, not just tomatoes) do require more nutrient inputs in order to produce well. They often need more nutrients and water in order to thrive and produce well, and I guess the trade-off for that is that most of them have more disease tolerance (often incorrectly described as resistance). Often, the breeders are focused primarily on other factors when breeding---shelf life, shipping, heavy yields, disease tolerance, pest tolerance, interesting colors or patterns, etc., and seem to forget that some of us are more focused on flavor, texture, nutrition, etc. That's my main issue with some hybrids----they look like the veggies we expect but don't necessarily taste all that great. If you look around and try a lot of hybrids, you eventually can find some that were bred with flavor in mind, but they are few and far between. I happen to like Big Boy and Better Boy and usually they are two of the early plants I buy in the stores in winter. I don't like them enough that I raise them from seed myself and plant several of each variety in the garden though. Don't even get me started on those sort-of-round, sort-of-square, orangeish-reddish and generally bland, flavorless bags of water sold as "tomatoes" in modern grocery stores. They normally are harvested green and artificially turned red (but not actually ripened) with ethylene gas exposure, and we are expected to somehow think we're eating tomatoes when we eat them. Ha! Those are poor excuses for tomatoes, but I guess if we picked our home-grown tomatoes while they are still green and as hard as a rock, and if we turned them red in that manner by using an artificial gas, then ours might taste as bad as the tomatoes sold in stores. I willingly forgo most grocery store tomatoes in the off-season because they aren't worth buying. I just try to preserve as much of our crop as possible so we are eating real tomatoes with real flavor in winter and early spring, even though the texture of preserved tomtoes is not the same as fresh tomatoes. Sometimes I buy the little containers of bite-sized tomatoes, and some of those can almost taste like a tomato and aren't too bad in salads, though I don't sit there and eat them like a bowl of grapes or anything. One thing I've noticed is that when people tell me they don't like tomatoes, the primary reason is that the only tomatoes they've ever eaten are grocery-store tomatoes. Once you talk them into eating a fresh, ripe, juicey home-grown tomato, they often discover they love tomatoes. The most common comment? "I never knew tomatoes could taste like this." The link between moisture levels in melons and tomatoes (and peaches and some other fruits) is well-known, as is the influence of heat and soil. Often, people who are new to growing their own fruits and veggies are unhappy with the flavor and texture of their melons and tomatoes (and sometimes peaches and plums) because they have overwatered and overfed them and the flavor and texture suffer accordingly. Once you can convince those folks to stop the overwatering and overfeeding, it is amazing how much better their produce tastes. I try to grow my melons and tomatoes as close to dryland style as possible. Some years it is impossible to grow them without irrigation because we are so hot and so dry that the plants won't survive or won't produce, but I carefully give them only the bare minimum in terms of irrigation. There's nothing that tastes better to me that melons grown dryland style in some of Love County's deep sandy soil. This once was a major melon-producing region. Now we mostly have horse ranches and some cattle ranches where the melons used to grow, which is a shame. I've always grown my melons at the sandy west end of the front garden, or in recent years, in the new back garden's sandy soil. I also get better cucumber and winter squash production from the back garden, and the figs that grow in the sandy soil are superb as well. While clay soil, once amended, is fine soil and highly nutritious, there's a lot of veggies and fruits that also thrive in sandy soil, including all the southern peas. It really makes garden planning easy---I generally put the sandy soil-loving plants in the back garden and everything else in the front garden. For the sake of crop rotation, though, I occasionally shake it up and grow some things in the front garden that normally grow in the back. I did that last year, but not by choice. Due to the 24" of rainfall that fell in May and left a continual river of water flowing through both gardens, I didn't even plant the back garden in 2015. The front garden has a lot of raised beds, so those beds were largely useable all year even when tons of water was standing in the pathways between the beds, but the back garden is grade-level soil and couldn't be used. Well, maybe I could have grown water cress and rice back in the back garden, but I didn't. Last year's weather was hard on the back garden. The fruit trees, comfrey. garlic and some perennial flowers back there survived all the water, but I don't think that all the coneflowers, penstemons and artemesias did. I guess I'll know more about that over the next couple of months. Eventually I'd like to build raised beds back there, and indeed, the voles that plague the softer, sandy soil make it imperative that we build hardware cloth-lined raised beds to protect the plant roots from the pine voles, but we just haven't done it yet since that garden is only a few years old. I guess I need to start adding one raised bed per year back there like I did with the front garden. I'm a lot older now than I was when we moved here in the late 1990s, and those harder tasks like building raised beds and filling them are not as enjoyable to me now as they once were. I do need to get the back garden into better shape though, because the front garden is in a clearing in the woodland and the tall trees encroach upon it from the north and west more and more every year. It is a fight now just to keep it sunny enough to use as a garden plot, and I've given back tons of former garden space to the shade already. My growing area of the front garden now is probably half of what it once was and I don't really want to lose any more of that growing space, but saving what is left is going to involve cutting down part of the woodland, and I always have tried to avoid taking out large trees just because they are becoming inconvenient. There's also the issue of herbicide contamination via the air killing plants in my front garden, though there was only the tiniest bit of damage last year. I did notice that my ranching neighbor carefully watched the guys who sprayed his pastures this past year....he sat on an ATV at his fenceline (the part of his property closest to ours) and watched every move they made. I think he was doing everything he could to prevent herbicide drift from hitting my garden and I greatly appreciate that. In recent years, too much herbicide drift damage has hit my tomato plants, often multiple times per season, and I've been extremely unhappy about that. It has come from multiple sources. The back garden is more sheltered and never yet has been damaged by herbicide drift, and that's one reason it exists....I knew I needed a better place to plant a garden where the risk of herbicide drift killing plants would be lower. Having two garden plots is wonderful, but I struggle with finding time to plant and maintain them both. It'd be better if I had an extra gardener just to handle the back garden. (grin) That seems unlikely to happen. My son and husband like eating from the garden, but they don't really garden themselves, though they do stroll out to the garden to harvest something if they want to eat it. They also are available for heavy lifting, shooting snakes and varmints in the garden, and taste-testing all the salsas, jellies and jams.