Once when my kids were little my son came running outside and said Mommy there is a HUGH rat in your bedroom, now it being daylight I am thinking he just THINKS he sees something and it is the 'lighting' or something but NOOOO he INSISTED there is something in my bedroom. MY fiancee is about to leave so I mozey my keyster in the house to my bedroom and GOOD GRIEF IT'S A POSSUM IN MY ROOM! And it is on my dresser at the moment. I do a quick 180 and run out to chase SO down and tell him he better be getting his hinney in here to get this thing OUT of my bedroom. He gets the broom and had removed the screen from the bedroom window HOPING it will jump out, but nope, it turns ever so slowly and WALKS back across the dresser, onto the windowsill, onto the headboard of my bed and disappears! OMG WHERE DID THE CRITTER GO???? Albeit it was a baby BUT it WAS a possum none the less, turns out there is a hole in the floor under our bed the little critter crawled through to come in. A mama possum had set-up a home underneath the mobile home and had actually gotten into the walls and maybe the ceiling too, I heard noises there ALL the time. I kept telling him SOMETHING BIG was in the walls, ceiling, FLOOR, under the trailer and HE always said it was stray cats I KNEW with the size of the sound I kept hearing it wasn't a cat! At any rate when the baby possum made it's appearance he finally figured out that was the sound (the mama possum) I had been hearing, he patched the hole so no more would come in and when we moved out I am assuming mama possum and more babies lived there long after we did! I am SOOOO glad I am not the only one who had a possum INSIDE their home! I just thought it was CREEPY!!! It was a cute little baby, but NOT IN MY BEDROOM! And it darn near terrified my son, he really thought it was a LARGE rat...poor kid, guess I would have too at 6 years old! He really wasn't far off either huh? :) Fran

Pam, "My" recipe is just my adaptation of Al's 5-1-1 mix from the Container Forum. I've tried to tailor it to the kind of conditions I have here, as well as to my wish to largely avoid peat as much as possible. I even vary what I put in it and in what proportions depending on whether I'm expecting a year that is wet, dry or average. For example, if we were expecting an El Nino spring with heavy rainfall, I'd mix it so it drains better but if I was expecting a drier year, I'd add coir to help it hold moisture. When it is very hot and dry here, even 20-gallon and larger containers often need to be watered twice or three times daily in hot weather so my container plants suffer in a dry year if the mix drains too quickly. As far as the ProMix, that's a lot of peat. If I was going to grow regular plants in it, I'd add pine bark fines for sure. If I was growing acid-lovers like blueberries or azaleas, I'd still add pine fines, but less of them. I can only dream of growing anything here that likes acidity because my soil and water both test at about 8.2 to 8.3. I can modity the soil and lower its pH pretty easily but not the water, so I don't grow anything that prefers highly acidic conditions. Peat is so peculiar. When it is wet, it can hold moisture forever, and that's what I don't like about it. And, when peat gets really, really dry it is hard to rewet it. In climates where the weather can swing from dropping several inches of rain in a few hours to virtually no rain at all for weeks or even months, I feel like mixes that have a heavy peat component underperform compared to mixes that have only a moderate amount of peat, or no peat at all. I do agree that pine bark fines improve any mix heavy in peat, and would drastically improved most any mix you can buy. The heavier peat component in starter mixes is necessary for great drainage, but I don't like that heavier percentage of peat for growing plants beyond the starter stage. Pine bark mulch seems controversial in terms of being used in a veggie garden and I suppose it might not be helpful in every situation and every climate. However, I have used it in years when I couldn't find much hay to use as mulch, and I loved it. It looked wonderful, didn't wash away in heavy downpours and didn't cause me any problems. I read a magazine article once that I think was written by a Texas gardener who was coping with high clay content...as in almost pure clay. Defying the conventional wisdom, he routinely rototilled huge amounts of pine fines and pine mulch (the smaller pieces, not the gigantic ones) into his clay and had huge improvement in a pretty fast time frame. He didn't even state whether he added additional nitrogen to compensate for whatever nitrogen is depeleting as the bark decomposes, but he had enormous soil improvement and was very pleased. His article made me smile because I had started adding some pine mulch to my soil about 3 years before and hadn't noticed any problems and also had huge improvement. For me, the amazing thing is how fast the mulch rototilled into soil breaks down. If I rototill it into soil in January or February, it is largely gone by the following winter. Only a few pieces that were larger than average to begin with will remain a year later. I started adding the pine mulch because so much of my compost was disappearing every year (as the old saying goes, "heat eats compost") and it seemed like I just couldn't add enough to the red clay to fix it. And, I should add, that my red clay is flower pot clay---I believe I could wet it down and work with it and make flower pots---so it takes massive amounts of improvement to make it workable. I wouldn't necessarily add pine bark to fairly normal soil. Having never had fairly normal soil, though, I use lots of pine. This year I added vast amounts of pine fines and humus to one 8' x 4' raised bed that had amended clay that just was not well-amended enough for potatoes. I then immediately planted the potatoes. That was probably in late January or very early February. Those potato plants are growing incredibly well and are about to flower. By contrast, the four long rows of potato plants planted at the west end of the main garden are 1/3 their size and a lot way from flowering. Those were planted in an 8" deep trench and I covered the seed potatoes with a couple of inches of soil, and then continued to add soil as they grew until the trenches were filled in. It really isn't even fair to compare the performance of potatoes in a raised bed to those in grade-level beds, but it is such a striking difference that I cannot believe it. I do think heavy, heavy rain that filled those trenches with water for several days likely had a negative impact on the potatoes and slowed them down. Clearly I need to add a gazillion tons of pine bark fines and compost to the west end of the veggie garden before next season. It is a sandier-clayier loam than the rest of the veggie garden, but no matter how much compost I add to it, it still seems like it isn't as improved as the heavier clay. I usually grow either sweet potatoes or potatoes there, but then find the soil rock-hard at digging time. It probably is the least-improved soil in which I grow veggies because it started out in better shape than the clay, so I kind of ignored it and didn't amend it nearly as much. Now that the rest of the soil is so much better than the west end, I need to work on the west end a lot to bring it up to speed. Susan, I'm sorry you couldn't get the soccer goal. That would have been so perfect. I find so many interesting things at garage sales that can be used in the garden. I got a wooden ladder for $3 once, painted it a medium purple, and now grow purple hyacinth beans on it. It is just the coolest-looking thing when you see only hints of the purple ladder peeking out through all that bean foliage and flowers. Mommyrosalyn, You're welcome and be sure to let us know what you end up with and how they do for you. That's how we all learn from one another. I did forget to list one favorite (not hard to do when you have 100 or 200 favorites) that doesn't get a lot of attention but which does produce very well in our climate, and it is one called Fantastic. There's also an improved version of it called Super Fantastic. I actually prefer Fantastic, which I have to raise from seed myself because I usually don't see it in stores, but I see Super Fantastic in stores pretty often. When you are tomato shopping in chain stores or nursery chain stores watch for tomato plants from Chef Jeff. That particular line carries oodles of heirlooms. However, if you can shop at The Tomatoman's Daughter or at any of the festivals where Duck Creek Farms sells heirloom tomato plants (see link to Duck Creek Farms website below---their schedule of farmer's market and festivals is available there), then any variety they sell likely would please you. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Duck Creek Farms

Gardenrod, Often I'll have 2 or 3 flushes of fruit on determinates and that is fairly typical of many of the determinates in our climate. I hit tomato overload a while back too, but now that production is dwindling, I'm starting to worry about running out of tomatoes. I think most of mine are about done setting fruit---even a lot of the cherry types are stalling. Our highs have been mostly in the 104-107 range for the last couple of weeks, so the tomatoes are not happy campers. Carol, I'm glad Al got to do his ceremony. At the present time our county is not giving burn permits to anyone at all, even though in previous years they have done so (on a limited basis) during a burn ban. In the last 5 days, we have had three large "page all" fires, where all 15 departments in the county are paged out to one large fire. We've never had three page alls in one week before, much less in 5 days. It is too hot to be out there at fires for hours on end. I'd rather be home picking or eating or canning tomatoes or, as far as that goes, I'd rather be home doing anything at all. Scott, If there is a tomato plant that is a more reliable producer in our heat than Fourth of July, I cannot imagine what it would be. Super Boy produces as well for me as Fourth of July but the flavor is nothing to get excited about. Diane, No one in my family but me has had any of the Jaune Flammee' tomatoes this year, because I stand there in the garden and eat them as fast as I can pick them. Dorothy, For me, Tess's has always had amazing flavor. Since you have so much more rainfall than I do here, I wonder if the moisture is affecting their flavor. Dawn

Make sure your plants have stakes or cages that will handle the vines when they are 2 or 3 times the current height. I'll let someone else address the Brandywine issue. The link at the end of this post gives url's of several good tomato databases, as well as two books about tomato varieties which you might want to look for at your local public library or bookstore. Re. Patio Hybrid, some quotations from various databases and vendors: ===== Patio F1 Hybrid Determinate The very compact plants, about two feet tall, are a very reliable producer of lots of tomatoes the size of tennis-balls (or larger), and have attractive dark green foliage. Although the plants are determinate, they produce so many tomatoes that the sheer weight of the fruit may pull the plants over, so it's best to give them some support - a stake or two will suffice. Tomatoes are ripe in about 70 days after transplanting out. ===== Hybrid. Early small salad tomato with red, 4-ounce, tennis-ball-sized (or larger) fruit. Dwarf, 2-foot plants developed for bedding and containers with dark green, bushy, potato-leaf foliage. Days To Maturity: 50-70 ===== Photos of Patio Hybrid, and more comments: http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/30768/ Here is a link that might be useful: http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/tomato/msg0622294625839.html?3