Frank, The NAR is our favorite tomato for taste. It's not like Brandywine. We like them both, but we like Neves better. It is a richer deeper flavor. Hope you love it like we do. The thing that bothers me is that you are looking at NAR tomatoes and I'm looking at 4" tall NAR seedlings. What part of AZ are you in? Bob - Northern Light

It was quite by accident that I came about the Ruumi Baanjan seeds, but I ranked it #3 out of all my tomatoes for taste last year, and my wife ranked it #1. If there is a downside to this variety, it is that there is not enough meat in it to make a good processing tomato, even though it is so thin skinned that a few turns in the blender are all that is needed to have the skins evaporate. Good juice tomato, poor sauce, great fresh eating. About 1/3 of the tomatoes were yellow-orange in a kind of sunburst, while the rest were straight yellow. And since all three plants gave that trait I am wondering if it has something to do with sun or heat. I will grow those seeds (which I separated by tomato color) in different areas of the yard to see how they do.

johnny, I experimented with aquarium heaters in my Spring IncuTainers 2 years ago. What I discovered is that here in San Jose, the weather warms up considerably quicker (this Spring was an exception) so that using them in February / March did not really make much of a difference to first harvest. However, for those in Upstate NY or similar climes, the aquarium heaters *may* be a worthwhile experiment to get a jump on the Season. Raybo

Assuming we are talking about Sudduths Brandywine, I have some experience with getting good production out of these plants - I've been growing it for 5 years in a row now. Even though Brandywine is a late variety, I tend to get it along side a lot of my mid-season tomatoes. I generally harden my plants off fairly early and then plant them out as soon as I think they are safe from frosts and the nighttime temps are (generally) around 50 degrees. I find that Brandywines seem to not only tolerate the cold, but they almost enjoy the cooler temps - In cooler, wet springs, I've had good fruit set on Brandywine when others were stagnating. One thing for certain is that they hate humidity and heat (80-90s and above). I already have a few brandywines with fruit set which were put out on May 1st, and I'll get a good couple more no doubt in the next few weeks, but it seems that every year, right around July / August, flowers will stop setting. Other plants continue to produce, some like NAR keep producing at the same rate without a hitch, but Brandywine will always trail off during the summer heat. As soon as temperatures go back down a little, it picks up where it left off... The shame of it is that a lot of these tomatoes won't ripen before the frost, but I do get a few more out of the deal. If you want to give it a try next year, you could try what I do and plant them out early and be prepared to protect them - keeping in mind how they don't like the heat of summer. As an aside, I read a post on pruning the other day and it got me thinking. In a lot of varieties, you can prune suckers here and there and probably not impact your yield too much; Brandywine doesn't seem to be one of those varieties. If you take into account that you might only get 1 or 2 set fruits per flower truss (maybe 3, but I don't tend to see that), pruning seems to severely hurt your yields, much more so than other varieties. The plants are a little finicky about setting blooms, so you're going to want as many blooms as you can get - best way to accomplish this is to let as much of the suckers grow as you can.