Many thanks...you weren't all wrong. I'm a newbie at this. West LA is in zone 10, but the rest is correct. Tomato plants are just arriving at local nurseries. The 1/2 barrel is a genuine wine barrel from a California winery. The nursery recommended a new Japanese variety called a Momotaro and two local container gardeners (both Brandywine types) said they planted this new variety last year and had fabulous yield and taste fruit! I just lucked into the plants, they are hard to come by. They both suggest two plants per 1/2 barrel. Many thanks for your help as I begin my grand adventure.

I too grow any kind of tom in containers; I use 15 or 20 g rubbermaid containers, many of which have two tomato plants in them. I have some determinates in 10 g round pots that I inherited. I absolutely loved Matt's Wild Cherry tomato; huge plant with great tasting, teeny tiny tomatoes. Right now I have fruit set on Beefsteak Marmanda, Cherokee Purple (Yay! first time growing it), MWC, and Stupice. Lots of flowers on the others. So far my plants are doing really well; I've got a basic potting soil (compost/sand/loam) amended with coir fiber, perlite, some slow release granular fert, bone meal, and greensand. I also fertilize 1x a week with ALgoflash. My plants look great. It might be a touch overkill but that's usually how it goes with container plants. I'm also using the water retaining polymers to help them through the dry spots (esp. when I'm on vacation and my housesitters water 1x a day in 100 degree heat...) Go for it! just have a big container and give them the goodies that they need (esp. staking). One more thing - I raised my containers up using some scrap wood, just to give them space to breathe underneath and allow water to more freely drain. My deck gets pretty hot.

As digdirt said, you need to do a little research on commercial growing. Here's a nickel tour: Commercial growers want tomatoes that produce a large quantity of uniform tomatoes, all at the same time, that are highly resistant to disease, pests, etc. They also want tomatoes that SHIP well. Most tomatoes are EXTREMELY sensitive when ripe, so that means MOST commercial growers pick their tomatoes at maximum SIZE, but before they start to ripen (aka change color). The ripening process is the part that allows the tomato to really develop its characteristic flavor, texture, etc. BUT, since commercial growers only want their fruit to LOOK good, rather than truly TASTE good, they simulate the ripening process (using by placing the tomatoes in an environment rich in ethylene gas (as given off greatly by bananas and apples). This gas turns the tomato red, BUT does not RIPEN the fruit! Therefore, the tomatoes you grow in the store are basically unripe tomatoes that just LOOK ripe. They have a "woody" quality to them and are not full of the array of flavors that tomatoes are truly capable of! Now, home grown tomatoes are grown especially for their TASTE. That means that looks are not as important (some heirlooms are extremely "funky" looking!). They are usually left on the tomato vine until fully ripe, which allows the tomatoes to fully reach their peak of flavor, texture, etc. Different varieties allowed to FULLY develop will actually change their flavor from competing varieties, hence the array of flavors available. There are also tomatoes of a tremendously diverse colors, from almost black to yellow to GREEN (yes, some tomatoes are RIPE and yet remain green!) In my opinion there are two kind of people in the world: tomato lovers (who then start to grow their own, because they understand the true nature and diversity of tomatoes) and the uninitiated! My wife didn't LIKE tomatoes before we were married and had bought a house where I could grow tomatoes. NOW, she LOVES tomatoes. She still picks the tomatoes off her sandwiches when we are out, because that's the "tomato" that she truly doesn't like. A good, home-grown tomato has shown her that all tomatoes are not equal! There is a huge difference, and once you experience a true tomato, you will understand that! Stick with heirloom varieties, if you want to richest diversity of flavors, textures, etc. Not only that, but heirlooms are the ONLY tomatoes that you can trust to produce seeds which will produce the same tomatoes the next year!

Jay, I am married to a former Pennsylvanian and he still has relatives there who garden and every summer I envy their cool temperatures (you know, they think 85 degrees is hot) and their usually abundant rainfall. When we go there to visit in summertime, everything is so lush and lovely that it blows my mind, especially compared to how roasting hot and tired everything looks in this part of the country at the same time. On the other hand, Late Blight seems to be on a tear there the last few years, so their beaufiful crops can fail suddenly. Marcy, That's a great list from the Kerr Center. Thanks for linking it. Susan, I think each of us adds/drops varieties for many reasons. After growing tomatoes for 25 years on my own and for at least 15 years with my dad prior to that, I'm just through with the massive experimentation. The truth is that out of every 20 or 25 new (to me) varieties that I try, maybe one or two is worth putting into the permanent growing rotation. So, rather than constantly looking for something new, I'm trying to refine the grow list and weed out those that perform least well in a broad range of conditions. I've reached the conclusion that there really aren't many, or maybe not any, incredible undiscovered varieties out there that taste/perform significantly better than what I've already tried....so I've stopped looking. I had high hopes for the Brandymaster series, likely because it is so tempting to believe there could be anything that could match Brandywine's flavor. They've performed so poorly here that I doubt I'd see a better performance next year or the year after. While many of you may be seeing significantly hotter or drier weather this year than in your average year, for us here in southcentral OK, our rainfall has been exactly 'average' for the year to date and so have our temperatures. If anything we've had slightly lower temperatures, in general, in Love County than we usually have although higher than average heat indices. So, for me, this is a pretty typical year except the real heat arrived in mid-May instead of late June so we got hot earlier, but not necessarily hotter than average...just earlier than average. A tomato variety that didn't perform well in what was a fairly typical year here at our place this year likely wouldn't perform any differently next year. In Oklahoma we have a wide range of average annual rainfall....some folks may average 15" of rainfall per year in western OK while others in eastern OK may average 50-60" or more. Humidity varies widely as does soil type and pH. So, what grows well for someone in highly alkaline soil and water in western OK may not grow nearly as well for someone in eastern OK with entirely different weather and soil. I enjoy looking at everybody's lists and hearing how different tomatoes perform for different people but I know that works well in areas drastically different from mine may not work well here. Growing in containers is much more complicated. First of all, nothing that I grow performs as well in containers as in the ground. Heat and pests hit container-grown plants much harder every year than those in the ground. The grasshoppers have completely stripped my container tomatoes of every leaf and fruit, but have only done sporadic damage to in-ground plants. It is the same thing with spider mites....only the container plants have had issues with them this summer. For me, container-grown tomatoes are great from Jan. or Feb. through the end of June or early July. After that, I might as well yank out those plants and toss them on the compost pile because they're toast. Last year, the tomatoes in containers did somewhat better than they usually do....but we had much higher than average rainfall and much more rain/clouds/cool weather than we see in an average summer. I'm looking for plants that perform best in the worst of conditions, not the best ones, because more often than not, we get the worst conditions every July and August. In containers, I plant tomatoes that can tolerate the heat and the restriction of their root growth and still perform. That means I often grow tomatoes in containers that I don't consider 'good enough' to plant into the ground....stuff like Better Bush and Husky Red Cherry. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm just at the point that I want what produces best for us here, and I don't want to keep looking for something 'better' because I don't think there is anything out there that's really that much better than our tried and true varieties that make our grow list most years. For a long time, I gardened for fun....trying any and every thing that interested me. We ate all we wanted fresh and gave tons away and didn't care if we put up much for the non-gardening season or not. In recent years, though, I've developed a deeper appreciation for the truly superior flavor of anything/everything that's grown locally and picked/prepared/preserved at its peak of perfection. Thus, I give away little and try to raise as much of our annual food supply as possible. In a good year I fill up three freezers, a root cellar and manage to can 2 or 3 or 4 hundred jars of 'stuff'. Since that is what is important to me now, I want plants that produce well, that provide tasty food we like and that are not prima donnas requiring a lot of pampering. Thus, I'm less inclined to experiment and more inclined to plant what produces really well with little fuss. In a lot of ways, the 'experimentation years' were a lot more fun, but the farm-garden-preserving years have been much more productive. Now my family is spoiled and I must produce as much home-grown food as possible because they don't like grocery store stuff as much as they used to. Even DS's firestation co-workers prefer fresh, home-grown and I'm going to try to plant a lot more for them next year so I can send them all the tomatoes, peppers and other yuummy things they're craving. There just isn't room, or enough improved soil, to experiment with varieties now as there used to be. I don't mind that, really, because as long as what I'm growing is producing well, I've gotten over thinking there are incredible varieties out there just waiting for me to find them. Megan, Black Plum grew very well for me for a long time and then for 2 or 3 years it didn't and I dropped it. It is odd how that happens....and I loved Coyote too. If my garden were twice as large as it is, I'd bring it back to the grow list. So many varieties, so little time (and improved soil). The tomatoes I grow from seed invariably outperform storebought ones and I don't know why, but I've seen it enough years to know it is true. Dawn