We grew about 800 heirloom tomatoes this summer, testing 11 varieties. We sell to several restaurants in the Central Arkansas area and the farmer's market. Our niche is large, great tasting heirloom tomatoes. We need flavor, good size, productivity and a tomato that makes it to ripe with a decent appearance. Our best three without a doubt were Carbon (a big dark red), Goldie ( a large golden, not yellow, high acid tomato and Annis Noir, a tomato that when dead ripe is green with red marbling. A little experience is necessary to know when this French heirloom is perfect but you learn quick and it is a fantastic tomato. I almost forgot, we also were extremely pleased with German Giant--big early flush of huge great tasting red tomatoes then a quick die off. There is a lot of competition growing heirlooms and we find it helps to have a color different from fire engine red and we also have found that small heirlooms are more common that truly large ones. Large is tougher to grow--they cat face and often, not as prolific and sell for more. I agree with Pauln that in the South, Brandywine is a non-productive tomato, one that I don't think taste any better than a Carbon. Other years we have had great luck with Oxxacan Jewell and Mariannas Peace but when we planted in subsequent seasons, they did not come through. These four appear to be great, dependable heirlooms in a very harsh climate.

Pam, The general rule of thumb is that boiling water bath canning is used for high-acid foods (including fruit, pickled vegetables in vinegar, tomatoes and sauerkraut (which you ferment first and then can). You use steam-pressure canning for low-acid food like meat, seafood, poultry, most vegetables and combination products that contain both high-acid and low-acid ingredients like chili, soups, stews, for example. An easy way to figure out if you would use a steam pressure canner enough to make buying one worthwhile or if a boiling water bath canner would be more useful to you, would be to buy the Ball Blue Book (or visit the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation) and check out the recipes. As you read through the recipes, observe whether the ones that appeal to you are preserved via pressure canning or BWB canning. Ironically, I dehydrate a lot more now that I have an oven that does it than I did when I had a dehydrator that sits on the counter. Of course, my oven is bigger than the dehydrator, so I can dehydrate a lot more at once. If you don't dehydrate a lot, you might not want to buy a dehydrator. I generally use my BWB canner for everything that can be safely preserved using the BWB method, and freeze or dehydrate everything else. I know how to pressure can and I have done it, but it generally is a longer process (the processing time for some pressure canned items is over an hour) and I don't do it very often any more. I have 4 stock pots in sizes we refer to as big, bigger, biggest and gigantic. I like my Ball Elite more than I like all 4 of them together because its bottom is much heavier and thicker and heats so evenly and does not scorch quickly. However, the set of stock pots that I have were not really high-quality but they've done the job for many years. You can use any stockpot as a boiling water bath canner and you can purchase canning jar racks in several different sizes so I would think it would be possible to find a canning rack that would fit in a stock pot. You can find a standard sized canning rack on the canning aisle at Wal-Mart, but for other sizes you'd likely have to look at Lee Valley Tools, Canning Pantry, or someplace else similar online that offers more sizes. How you choose to preserve food usually depends on your family's preferences. My family prefers frozen green beans to canned ones, so I freeze all the ones we can't eat fresh instead of canning them. I have a friend whose family prefers the texture of canned green beans, so she pressure cans hers. Different strokes for different folks and all that. You also have to consider your weather and its effect on your electrical power. We rarely have power outages here, being just far enough south to generally escape the ice storms that cause severe and long-lasting power outages across many parts of OK some years. Thus, I fill my freezers with food and know the risk of a power outage that lasts long enough for the food to spoil is incredibly low here. Since you're in hurricane country, you might be better off preserving more food by canning than by freezing unless you have a generator that would allow you to keep the freezer running. For years and years I searched for a salsa recipe that was not as vinegary (or hot!) as my dad's and never really found one we loved (although we ate them all), until I found the Annie's Salsa recipe at the Harvest Forum. It is just ridiculous how much we love Annie's Salsa, particularly when I use Realemon and ReaLime as an approved sub for some of the vinegar. By varying the type of hot peppers I use, I make it with different levels of heat and indicate the extra heat by putting 3, 4 or 5 stars on the jar label. I have found food preservation to be just as much of a fascinating journey as gardening has been. You just don't know where the food preservation activities will lead you. I used to be happy if I made a batch or two of peach and plum jelly, a couple of batches of salsa, a few batches of pickles and some canned tomatoes. Now I can endlessly all summer long until I've completely exhausted myself. When you have technical questions, the experts over at the Harvest Forum can answer any question you can come up with. It sort of amuses me that canning and other forms of food preservation have become so popular again. In the 1980s and 1990s I often felt like I was the only person my age who was canning. If I needed to ask a question, I was calling someone who was old enough to be my grandmother. Nowadays, everyone is canning. While I think that is great, it also means that the stores run out of canning supplies more than they used to. For much of my adult life, people my age thought that I was weird because I preferred to grow our own veggies and fruit and to preserve as many of them as I could. Now, after being "out of style" for so long, I suddenly find that I am right back in style again. Tim and I get a big laugh out of that! Dawn

Paula, FYI, a lot of those ornamental peppers reseed for me. That's one thing about them that I really like. Dody, That should be my slogan "So many choices, so little room", and I should cross stitch it onto a sampler to hang in my potting shed. Charlie, You're welcome. Ask and ye shall receive. Going through the list and researching all those varieties might take you a little while, but it is something to do in the "off season". Chandra, Oh, no, that's not the list of what I'm growing in 2011. It is just the list of my personal favorites. They've become favorites because they tolerate our weather and produce well. After I posted the list of OSU-recommended varieties, Charlie wanted to know what it is that people "really" plant though, so I posted the list so he'd know what I, for one, like to plant. I mean no disrespect towards the OSU-recommended varieties, or the varieties recomended by any other university, like Texas A&M, for example. Even when I lived in Texas, I looked at their list and then made my own choices. While the varieties recommended by the various universities for their areas have been researched, often the research is done more on hybrids than OPs, and often productivity or shelf life gets as much attention as flavor, for example. Remember that university research sometimes is geared more towards commercial farmers than home gardeners. So, I try to choose varieties for our specific home garden that tolerate our weather, produce a worthwhile yield and also, those whose flavor we prefer. Where to find them? Almost everything I listed should be available from one or two or more of the following online sources, or at least they have been in the past. In a couple of cases, there's only one or two sources, and I've listed it below. The websites are my best guess and if I'm off by a letter or two, you can find them by googling. Victory Seeds (victoryseed.com) Willhite Seed (willhiteseed.com) Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (southernexposure.com) Seed Savers Exchange (seedsavers.net) Baker Creek Rare Seeds (rareseeds.com) Totally Tomatoes (totallytomatoes.com) Tomato Growers Supply Company (tomatogrowers.com) Ramapo tomato is available directly from Rutgers/NJAES. Moreton is also available there. I believe Little Lucy okra is available from a couple of places, and one of them is Park Seed. Baby Bubba is available from Burpee. Moreton and Supersonic tomato seed are available from Harris Seed. I get seed potatoes locally, from organic grocery stores in the DFW metroplex and from Ronningers, which has a new website you can find by googling. I'm not sure the new website is completely functional yet. I get my onion plants from Dixondale Farms and recommend them highly. If you are in the OKC-Norman metro area or in the Tulsa metro area, you may find all those same varieties locally, but I can't find all of them here in southern OK. Almost all the tomato and pepper varieties I listed are available from either Tomato Growers Supply or Totally Tomatoes if you don't find them on the websites of the other seed companies. Biker Billy Jalapeno, though, is from Burpee so only available from Burpee and its sister companies. Dawn

"Colorado Seed Co" says Rio Grande is a popular variety in Europe that is very prolific, and they call it Rio Grande in Europe and Roma Grande here, if that isn't a typo. A US reviewer, Sarah, on the Franchi seed site calls Rio Grande semi-determinate and someone in another community says it kept yielding cluster after cluster right till frost. Roma Grande in a Pennsylvania trial last year was the #1 paste tomatoes for production and #5 for flavor. The grower in charge of the trial mentions the package was available as Burpee seeds in Lowes but not in the online catalog. I bet that is the study you reference since the 31.1 pound/plant yield is there, except it was 24 plants, not 17 as you mentioned. Also, The package of tomatoes was part (1/5 packs of seeds) of the now discontinued Burpee Bamboo salsa kit. Cook's Garden seeds according to an Uncle Wayne else called Roma Grande an OP indeterminate. I bet if you contacted Franchi, Cook's or Colorado you would get your answers as to your cultivar, and it wouldn't surprise me if someting dumb happened, like Burpee not identifying the paste tomato in its kit with the real name, so it wouldn't be seen as an endorsement as being a favorite LOL Maybe they just buy a little from someone like Franchi and rebrand it under the table, since people in many big marketing departments tend to be more concerned with ... marketing. Here is a link that might be useful: Roma (Rio) Grande