I see you got a couple of answers to your post of this question over on the Tomato Forum here. Some also suggested you check with the folks on the Florida Gardening forum as they can advise you specifically about timing in Florida. From what I have read in the past from Florida Gardeners, yes it is too late for planting now to beat the heat and the blossom drop that results. You have 2 tomato growing seasons down there - Fall and Winter to very Early Spring. As to container sizes, Better Boy is a very large indeterminate variety that can easily grow to 6-8 feet tall or taller and will need a very large container (7-10 gallons minimum is common) and good support. I linked a picture of an average plant below. Dave Here is a link that might be useful: Better boy tomato plant

Hi riceke, thanks for the response. I have never grown tomatoes from seed (on purpose anyway). I was lurking in the greenhouse forum since my greenhouse is getting close to being put into use and saw this wonderful thread complete with photos on someone's success in growing Better Boys from seed and then training them as vines along a suspended cattle panel in their greenhouse which looks very similar to mine in approximate size, shape, etc...It looked like a real space-saving technique. I have always done well with Better Boys in the garden and just wanted to get some additional takes on growing them from seed, preferably from folks in my neck of the woods. I have also been conversing with that thread's original poster too and have alot of info to work with. I didn't even know hobby gardeners could grow named market hybrids from seed until I saw her post. Now I'm a little more knowledgeable about F1 and F2 seed generations. Still would love to hear about anyone else's experiences growing Better Boys from F1 (first generation) seed. Specifically tips on germination rates, success and care of young seedlings. I've grown melons, cukes and some flowers from seed so I'm not a total seed growing noob but I am when it comes to starting toms from seed. Danielle

Seedmama, This will come as a surprise to no one, but my self-induced gardening agony is that I try to plant too much of everything even when I know I don't/won't have space for all of it. People who know me understand that I never have enough space for everything I want to plant, and people who don't know me could never understand why I 'think' I need 60-80 varieties of tomatoes, or 300 Sugar Snap/Super Sugar Snap pea plants, 100 broccoli plants (but only 3 varieties so I did show some restraint there), 6 types of onions, 12 kinds of beans, 8 kinds of zinnias, 10 basil varieties and 10 varieties of sunflowers. Honestly, do I need to grow all that? Well, yes I do, or I wouldn't be trying to do it. If we had good soil here, at least it would make a little sense to use that nice soil and not let it go to waste. Unfortunately, we have very dense, thick, slow-draining red clay that requires huge amounts of amendment just to make it possible to grow anything in it at all. This year, we've doubled our garden space although the big 'new' garden won't be ready for planting for another 2 or 3 weeks, and even then it has had only what I consider minimal soil improvement. It will be fenced though, and that's a good starting point since anything unfenced is devoured by deer, rabbits and such. I'm also planning to have at least 100 containers this year and maybe even more unless I run out of planting time because the heat arrives. I wasn't always this way, you know. For our first couple of years here, I was content to have only a dozen varieties of tomatoes, and pretty much one variety of corn, beans, okra, etc. I have always had lots of flower varieties but still not on the scale I have now. Slowly, though, the garden began to expand and I began to plant more, more, more every year. One year in the early 2000s as I struggled to plant everything I had in flats, I remarked to DH that I was really putting pressure on myself to get all the flats emptied and all the plants in the ground by a particular date--I think it was Memorial Day. He wryly commented that it really didn't matter because once I emptied the flats, I'd just fill them up again with more soil and seeds...and he was right. When we decided to move from a large city in Texas to rural southern OK, one of our reasons was so we could have space for more fruit trees, blackberries, veggies and flowers. You have to be careful what you wish for, though, because with all that land available, I can't seem to stop planting. I need a T-shirt that says "Somebody Help Me.....I Can't Stop Planting". All that planting inevitably leads to long days in the garden and in the house dealing with the harvest. At times, I am sure my family and friends think I'm insane. Forty jars of jam/jelly? Fifty jars of pickles? Sixty jars of salsa? You get the idea..... Yesterday, an old gardening buddy dropped by and tried to give me some 'extra' corn seed he had, and I turned it down because I thought my DH might leave me if I told him I needed him to rototill and fence "just one more" area so I could add something else. Then my old rancher friend (who at 88 years of age is more energetic than anyone else I know) told me, regretfully, that his wife told him not to plant a garden this year because her health will not allow her to put up all that produce or help with the harvest, etc. I asked my friend if he was, then, not going to have a garden after all and he never directly answered....but told me he already had his onions and potatoes in the ground and was getting ready to plant corn, and would at least have tomato plants in his molasses feed tubs. He still seemed kind of bummed out about "not" having a garden, so I volunteered to help him. I told him to plant what he wanted and to tell his dear, sweet wife that I would help him harvest the crops and put them up. As I was relating this story to my DH, he finished the ending before I could tell him about my offer to help. He said "you told him we'd help him right".... You know, it is a very wise man who understands his wife and how she thinks and what she's likely to do and still loves her and puts up wih her anyway. So, in two words (although, lol, I used a gazillion more than that), my self-induced gardening agony is "too much" of everything. Dawn

I grew 25 heirlooms, each different, last year, spacing them about 12" - 18" apart in a bed that gets about 7 hours of sun in midsummer. They grew on a long trellis pretty uniformly up to about 7 feet tall. They produced OK, though certainly not as well as I've read in many of the posts here. I gave my extra plants to a friend with a bigger and sunnier garden, and his plants were shorter, bushier, and produced more heavily. This year I'm growing 39 plants of mostly the same varieties in a new bed that's 4 feet wide and 40 feet long, with two rows of plants spaced two feet apart in alternate rows, with the rows being two feet apart. They are probably still too crowded but they have much more room than last year's plants. They are getting about 8 - 9 hours of sun per day. Also, I started my seeds too soon this year, so the plants were a little leggy when I put them in the ground. I planted the root ball and about 6 to 8 inches of stem sideways in the planting hole. I made no other changes in my organic gardening techniques from last year to this year. I didn't do any pruning last year or this year. So, between all those changes, I have much shorter and much bushier plants this year. They were already 6 feet high this time last year, and this year they are generally around 4 feet high. It's too early to predict the production, but I seem to have a lot more blooms and a lot more fruit on the plants than this time last year.