If you're looking to trade for a plant you might want to try the plant exchange forum instead. This forum is for exchanging seeds only. Good luck!

Mike, I grow almost all OP's, not hybrids, but when I do grow hybrids they're by choice mostly some of the earliest ones bred b'c I think they have the best tastes. So no, I haven't grown Bush Early Hybrid but have grown the following F1's which I think are worthy: Jet Star Supersonic Moreton Hybrid .....the above three bred by Harris Seeds Ramapo F1, bred by Rutgers Big Boy, bred by Dr. Oved Schifriss when he was at Burpee and has one parent that's a large pink heirloom from the midwest called Teddy Jones. Better Boy, bred by John Peto, the founder of Petoseeds and also has Teddy Jones as one parent. Sungold F1, always a standard for me Smarty F1, a grape tomato bred by Dr. Randy Gardner, formerly of NCSU, and available at Johnny's. Mountain Magic F1, a largish red cherry also bred by Randy and hopefully seeds will be available commercially soon and has the latest, most up to date Late Blight (P.infestans) genes bred into it as well as several other disease genes, as does Plum Regal F1, also bred by Randy and hopefully seeds soon, but I like MM much better than PR. I think it's good to know that none of the hybrids, with just a couple of exceptions, have tolrance against any of the most common diseases, which are the foliage diseases. And those that have a long string of alphabet letters after their names pertain to systemic diseases and those systemic diseases are NOT found in all parts of the country. Using Celebrity as an example, it's VFFNTA, so V= Verticillium, a systemic disease common in some parts of the country and not in others FF= races 1 and 2 of Fusarium which is also a systemic disease found in very few parts of the country, mainly the south, along the East coast down to FL, along the Gulf Coast up into FL, but lacks tolerance to race 3 which is found in certain areas and there's no cross protection between the various races. N= Root Knot Nematodes, a systemic disease only found primarily in southern regions where soils don't freeze deeply in the winter. T= tobacco mosaic virus, also a systemic disease and really no longer a problem anywhere except in large greenhouse operations where it can be transmitted Manually. A= Alternaria, and I'm not sure if that's Alternaria Stem Canker found almost exclusively in CA or just regular Alternaria which is also a systemic disease and not widely found. OK, I confess, I don't like the taste of Celebrity at all. ( smile) Hope that helps. Carolyn

Marcantonio, I can give you a positive report on the flavor of the Celebrity Tomatoes. We ate a few again today and I had forgotten how good they taste!! They are not as good as a Brandy Boy but certainly worth growing if the plant does well in your garden. Our frost protection could not protect the plants from frost last night - the plants are done! Still - October 12th is not bad for Wyoming planted outside - especially considering how prolific they are! We have already harvested as many as what are still remaining on these plants! I pulled most the remaining tomatoes off the plants today - I think most of them will ripen on the counter? Even though the plants were killed with last night's frost - with our frost protection - I doubt the tomatoes were damaged. You can see that there are 6 oz tomatoes but there are as many 8-10 oz tomatoes. It is also worth mentioning that the Celebrity tomatoes crack very little - must be because of their thicker skin? We report - you decide - haha

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.