Hi guys! Glad to see you are still around. These last couple of years I have been working in Panama, near the canal zone, in a development project building affordable housing for locals. It's been exhausting and taken all my energy. During the absence my wife did what she could to maintain the yard with the kids and many things are still around: most of my bushes, trees and daffodils, many crinums, salvias, and even a Hesperaloe and sedums and irises. Overall things still look ok. The soil amended with permatill has fared remarkably well. The soil is low in organic matter but is still workable. So I got some aged turkey manure mixed with more permatill at 60/40 and am working it in as we speak. It should be very nice by summer. Let me know when the swap is going to be. I have some cold hardy crinum, basjoo banana, salvia, iris, and other goodies to exchange. Still having to go back and forth to Panama but I'll try to be here for the exchange. It would help if we can set the date sometime soon so I can make my plane reservations accordingly. My geocities website was taken down by geocities folding so I will have to set up a new one. Hopefully will post pictures next week. RJ

Hi Stephanie! We had hours of thunder and lighning....but so little rain. I was hoping that if we were going to have all that "fuss", we'd have a good old-fashioned downpour to go along with it. We haven't had a REAL thunderstorm in such a very long time here. We had a thunderstorm last summer, probably in late July or early August. It had been SO VERY LONG since we'd had one that we went out to the covered porch that is attached to our barn and sat in the lawn chairs and watched it rain! Isn't that pitiful? We later found out that a lot of our neighbors did the same thing. LOL It was a lovely storm...lots of huge dark clouds and tons of lightning (one lightning strike ignited a fire in a hay barn north of us)...and we had a double rainbow. We got about 3/4s of an inch of rain in a fairly short time. I really miss the rain. (sigh) During the recent ice storms we had thundersleet and that was pretty cool. And, back in 2004 we had thundersnow. Oklahoma weather can be pretty interesting, and is rarely dull. Already this morning I have started seeds in little peat pots for 60 kinds of hot peppers, sweet peppers and herbs . Now that all the tomatoes are outside for good, the lighted shelves I use for seed starting were looking sort of empty. I don't get into much of a hurry with the peppers since they sulk if planted in cool soil. I'll be mowing three acres of rye grass today! Also planting nasturtiums "Caribbean Cocktail" as a companion plant in the vegetable garden, and, of course, today the tomatoes will actually go into the ground. About that laundry and housework....do you mean to tell me that we are actually expected to do those tasks when it is "gardening time"? I ALMOST have my husband and son convinced that you shouldn't cook or do laundry or do housework anytime the sun is shining and it is warm enough to be outside in the yard. Note that I said "almost". I'm home alone today, so once I step outside in a few minutes, I have no intention of coming inside to do anything! Have a wonderful and productive day. Hope the fence project goes well. Dawn

Thanks everyone for all the input and advice! I wanted a lot of seeds because I hoped to offer them to the people on seed savers forum who donated seeds to a program with people who have profound disabilities where I work. These are probably a named tomato but I don't know the variety. The Swartzentruber Amish family I buy them from doesn't know the type. They just call it a low acid tomato and have been saving the seeds for "a long time". The plants produce an amazing yield of large to very large tomatoes. The fruit is meaty and most are round or oblong, rarely lumpy and excellent for slicing. They have good old fashioned flavor. I actually like the flavor of the brandywine and better yet, Cleota Pinks a little more, but these are very worthy tomatoes. From the road or vegetable stand I can't tell if the plants are potato leafed or not. I did save seeds from several nice tomatoes that weren't blanched. Instead of fermenting them the way I usually do, I placed them in a tupperware sandwich container with pinholes punched all through the lid (from different project). They got moldy!!!!!! Don't know if I'll have any to share or not. Might go buy a few more. They sell individually for .50 a piece. So.. that's the story behind the seeds! Linda Renee

Tracy, ah Zebraman confused me. I thought you were in Cali. I scanned various desert climates regularly this year to see what we were all facing. Tucson is no picnic, but Phoenix was consistently the hottest area I watched. Vegas and other parts of the Mojave, like where I am, gave you good competition, but we cool off at night a lot better than you do during most of the summer. By cool off I mean low 90s and high 80s for me, when you'd barely dip under 100 at 3am. Peppers have done so well for me that I halfway wonder if I should transfer the addiction from tomatoes. For me it's jalepenos, habs, serranos, and a mystery hot pepper I'll photograph for the pepper forum on one side of the house, and Cal Wonder and Big Dipper producing bags of peppers weekly on the other side. Total of 20 pepper plants all going nuts into the fall. For now I'm not yet doing anything other than what I described above (some temporary plastic wrapped pvc frames over a couple loaded plants, and planning a hoophouse with seed already started). I am going to try to keep the hoophouse from freezing with solar heated water (filled milk jugs, a 96 gal. trashcan, etc), but I suspect I'll run a propane heater for a few nights when we go into the teens like most years. I will give it a shot for seed starting, but a garage setup with shoplights has been ideal for me. You said: "I'd like to get some heirloom seeds from somewhere." There's dozens of seed sources online. People here, myself included, will happily send you some seed if they see this. You might want to set your email preference so you can be contacted by forum members. Trudi posts here and runs the Wintersown site. She has a growing variety of free seed available. Check out that link then click on Tomato SASE on the left side to see what she offers... for free. You may want to spend a little more time reading that long Desert Strategy thread though. Some varieties you may want to grow just don't perform for us. In my experience, you can grow cherry types to your heart's content, determinates started early seem to find a weather window to produce decently, the earlier 'days to maturity' the better for indeterminates. Good luck.