Sammy, Here's a few comments on the ones you have: Arkansas Traveler--a long-time favorite of ours. Produces mid- to late-season here which is nice because it is giving you ripe tomatoes after some of the earlier ones have been shut down by heat. Very good flavor and a good producer in heat. Yellow Plum--haven't grown it Lemon Boy--the first non-red, non-pink tomato I ever grew, probably back in about 1995 or 1996. Very good flavor unlike some yellow varieties that seem bland. Produces very well in heat and has fairly good disease resistance. Husky Red Cherry--I grow this one every year simply because it is available as large transplants in Dallas stores in February when I am buying a handful of plants for containers so I can have extra-early tomatoes. Flavor is only average and I don't like the thick skins, but DH eats them happily all summer long. It is a good one for containers. When I grow it in containers it gets about 4' tall and almost as wide. The very thick foliage helps prevent sunscald. Produces large red cherry tomatoes. This generally is the earliest to produce for us, and just this week I have begun harvesting ripe fruit from it. The two that I have in 3-gallon pots are loaded with fruit, but they cannot survive the summer in 3-gallon pots and I'm getting ready to transplant them into either larger containers or into the ground. Porter's Dark Cherry--I've grown Porter (pink, great flavor, sort of egg-shaped, and almost too big to be considered a cherry type) and Improved Porter (red, rounder, about 4-5 oz. tomatoes) ever since I was in high school in the 1970s. Both were among the varieties introduced decades ago by the now-defunct Gene Porter & Sons seed company based in Stephenville, Texas. I believe Porter Dark Cherry is just a re-named version of Porter, and folks who have grown the two side-by-side say they believe that is true as well. I grew up where Porter seeds and transplants were sold and remember both 'Porter' and 'Improved Porter' well but don't remember a 'Porter Dark Cherry' being in existence then. I used to see 'Porter' on the store shelves all the time, but the last couple of years it seems to have disappeared and to have been replaced with 'Porter's Dark Cherry' which leads me to think it was just renamed. Porter produces better in heat than most, resists disease, produces heavily most of the time, and has flavor more like large slicers than like other cherry types. You won't find a more heat-tolerant or drought-tolerant tomato. Sweetie--There isn't necessarily anything specific about this tomato that stands out in my mind. It is your typical heavily-producing red cherry with very sweet flavor. Red Beefsteak--There are different red beefsteaks sold under this name, unfortunately, and that can lead to confusion. The 'Red Beefsteak" I grow produces fruit very much like Red Ponderosa that are big, beefsteak-shaped, red, produced in clusters of 3 or 4 all over the plant, have thick, rampant foliage and produces well until the heat hits and shuts it down. Fruit has good flavor in a dry year, but in a very wet year or with very heavy irrigation, the flavor and texture suffers. That is true of most large-fruited beefsteak types though. I think of Red Beefsteak as the classic sandwich tomato. Carbon--This is a black tomato with nice, smooth fruit and very good flavor. Produces well in heat. Juliet--Another thick-skinned type but it produces heavily and the flavor is typical grape tomato flavor. In the years when I grow these, I use them only for dehydrating because dried tomatoes have tough skin anyway so their thick skin isn't a problem if you're dehydrating them. Radiator Jimmy (Charlie's) Mortgage Lifter--You said 'Jimmy' but I assume you mean "Charlie's". This is my second-favorite version of Mortgage Lifter. It produces well and has great flavor and moderate disease resistance. I always grew this one every year until I planted Estler's Mortgage Lifter, which I find has flavor my taste buds like more and produces earlier and more heavily in my garden. Radiator Charlie's is a great tomato for our climate even though I now prefer Estler's Mortgage Lifter. Cherokee Purple--one our favorites too Early Girl--This one has typical hybrid flavor and great disease resistance. I call her 'Late Girl' in my garden because she never produces early for me. I usually get ripe fruit from EG about the same time I'm getting ripe fruit from Celebrity or Better Boy, no matter if I used home-grown or purchased transplants and no matter the seed source. I don't know why she isn't early for me. However, many years, Early Girl produces for at least six months and is often one of only a handful of plants setting new fruit in mid-July through late August when the heat is at its worst. Celebrity--Better flavor than some other hybrids and an amazing tolerance of or resistance to many diseases and to nematodes as well. There are a handful of red hybrids I like better in terms of flavor (Better Boy, Boy Boy, Big Beef and Beemaster among them), but this is an excellent variety for our climate. There are lots of ways to freeze tomatoes, and I use various ones. You can pick and wash the tomatoes and put them into zip-lock freezer bags whole and intact. When you are ready to use them, just thaw them. Some people use this method to accumulate enough tomatoes to cook up a big batch of sauce or salsa. You can pick and wash the tomatoes, remove their skins using the boiling water method, and freeze them whole but skinless. You can remove the skin and, if desired, the seeds, and cook these down into stewed tomatoes to freeze to use in cooking. You can pick and wash the tomatoes, process and cook into salsa and freeze it in freezer jars or contaienrs, or process and cook it into tomato sauce and freeze it in freezer jars or containers. Dawn

Shekanahh, For what it is worth, I think most colorful heirlooms are higher in nutrients and studies have shown organically grown produce is higher in antioxidants, which makes sense because the organically-grown produce have to fight diseases and pests on their own, thereby producing their own stronger phytochemicals and antioxidants in the process. (My taste buds tell me many heirlooms are superior in flavor too, and so is organically grown produce.) When we moved here to very rural Love County in the late 1990s, I think I was pretty much tagged a "hippie" by the old farmer and old rancher crowd around me because I grew heirloom varieties in odd colors and I grew them organically. Good heavens! Clearly they all thought I was nuts and they tried hard to convert me to chemically-based gardening. Some of them now grow and love Black Krim and Cherokee Purple as much as I do, by the way, because good-flavored tomatoes won them over (although they thought I was giving them "rotten" tomatoes the first time I gave them black and purple ones to eat). Occasionally, one of them asks me about an organic solution to a garden problem now, so I feel like they've accepted me and my "unorthodox" ways even if I haven't fully converted them to organics. The dark-colored tomatoes are my favorites. Some years I have grown as many as 10-15 different varieties of black, purple or pink tomatoes. This year I dropped a lot of the blacks in order to try some new red hybrids, but undoubtedly next year I'll grow fewer reds and more blacks. I grow a lot of yellows, golds, oranges and pinks too. Just because the grocery store world wants red tomatoes doesn't mean the rest of us can't grow the other ones. This year, I dropped Cherokee Purple and Black Krim, both of which I have grown for many years because I was growing Indian Stripe and True Black Brandywine. Then, somewhere along the way, something happened to my two True Black Brandywine plants---one was snapped in half while very small and still in its paper cup (and I was at an all-day-long wild fire, so didn't get home in time to find it and root the broken top before it wilted and died) and then the other one just wilted and die, perhaps from severe windburn on a day I was hardening off the plants and was at another wild fire. I could have survived without Black Krim, but then when I saw it, I thought of the two dead Black Brandywines and decided to get one. Aunt Ruby's was an impulse buy just because it is such a tasty tomato. If you want to grow some of the black and purple ones, here's some great ones: Black Cherry (indescribably delicious) Black Krim (long time favorite, but True Black Brandywine is more productive for me and cracks less) True Black Brandywine (I got my seed from rareseeds.com) Cherokee Purple (first "purple" tomato I ever grew and a ong-time fave) Cherokee Chocolate Indian Stripe (has more-or-less replaced Cherokee Purple for me and is believed to be a variant of Cherokee Purple--I'll write a paragraph about its history below) Carbon Black From Tula Black Sea Man Black Plum Black Pear Paul Robeson Chocolate Stripes (new for me this year and I have 4 of these planted--two in the ground and two in containers) Pruden's Purple Indian Stripe: This tomato has achieved the impossible---it has gotten me to drop Cherokee Purple after growing it for well over a decade! I thought nothing would ever replace CP, but IS has. However, when you are growing Indian Stripe, you still ARE growing a version of Cherokee Purple. Indian Stripe was introduced by Dr. Carolyn Male after she received seed from a Texas gardener who I believe got them from an Arkansas gardener who knew them as Arkansas Zebra. They are believed (by Carolyn Male and by Craig LeHoullier who originally received seed for Cherokee Purple from JD Green in Tennessee) to be a variant of Cherokee Purple that was grown in isolation in Arkansas for many years (many Cherokee people settled in Arkansas), but IS has slightly smaller and slightly lighter-colored fruit with distinctive darker stripes both in the green and ripe stage. IS grows more fruit than CP in its clusters and, in my garden, it is slightly earlier than CP and definitely more productive and with less fruit cracking. The flavor of IS is either exactly the same as CP or slightly better, and if Dr. Carolyn and Craig LeHoullier believe IS is a variant of CP, that's good enough for me since they are the two people responsible for "saving" these two heirlooms and making them widely available. I got my seed of Indian Stripe from Victory Seeds and Carolyn was their seed source. For years I have said that if I could only grow one tomato variety it would be Black Krim. However, since True Black Brandywine has proven to be just as flavorful and produces more fruit per plant, I'd have to say it would be my "only" if I could plant just one variety, and Indian Stripe would be my second choice. Honestly, Brandywine would be my choice of an "only" variety if it would produce more than six fruit per plant per summer in our climate, but it doesn't, so it isn't. Carol, You are a woman after my own heart! I think ProMix would make a lovely gift for any gardener for any occasion. In our family, practical gifts are cherished much more than less useful ones. I think woodworking equipment is much more useful than guns myself. DS and DH have quite a few guns between them, but they don't get used as much as any and all of my gardening tools. Dawn

I love this post. I read so much as a kid, I remember throwing down a spare mattress on our basement floor (where I could find some peace and quiet from my large and loud family) and reading entire books in one sitting. My favorites: The Secret Garden The Boxcar Children A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Little House in the Prairie series Charlotte's Web (also loved Stuart Little and Trumpet of the Swan, I still all three of my originals, it was a set). Loved all the Ramona Quimby books. Choose your Own Adventure books...the where you get decide which route to take in the book, and each one leads you to a different ending. Many more, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head. I still have a bunch of books from my childhood. My Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes is another favorite.

Moc - Millman tells the fictionalized account of himself as a college student and his introduction to the concept of living in the moment and being acutely aware of everything going on around you at that exact moment. Some might call it a state of enlightenment and he does explore that concept too. Although this is a fictional tale, he tells the tale as if it really happened to him and I gather that parts of it did actually happen but he embelishes. Much more tame and understandable than Ekhart Tolle. I swear that with a little practice, there are times when if you really really focus on all the details creating one particular moment and really take in those details, it is almost like stopping time for one brief moment. Weird and unbelieveable, but attainable. Good luck. An aging hippie chick I met near Brevard, NC got me interested in reading the book then coached me along for a short while. But like daffodils in spring, or desert flowers after a rainstorm, our time together was brief yet memorable. Scott