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.

Game on! Let the Tomato Wars begin! LOL! I cracked up when I read your post, Bonnie--a/k/a HighAlt! I decided a few years ago that the biggest problem with growing tomatoes is finding out what works for YOU. I've been getting recommendations here for what to try ever since I got this house and had a place to grow veggies, and sometimes they do well, and sometimes they totally flop! I don't think there was anything wrong with the recommendations for the ones that flopped, I just think the people recommending them had different growing conditions from me. I still haven't found a red that's on my Must Have list, but I did FINALLY find a yellow/orange last year that will most likely be found in my garden into perpetuity! This won't help on this thread because I'm sure it's not available as a plant, but if anyone is wondering, it's Earl of Edgecombe. Set fruit the earliest of my large tomatoes and didn't seem to be much phased by heat--and large flavorful tomatoes. Ripened well when cut and hung in the garage too! It's a keeper for me--but who knows how well it would grow for someone else! But the thing that really cracked me up, HighAlt, was your recommendations for cherries! Hmmm! Too bad we're too far away from each other to do some Pelting! ;-) On the recommendation of several people around here I tried Black Cherry in '08, and I didn't find them to have much flavor at all (Who's gonna do the Pelting now!) For me they also took a LONG time to ripen, and they seemed to ripen just a few at a time, so I never really got a large amount to gorge on at any one time--unlike SunGold. I do totally agree that SunGold has a cracking problem, and if I didn't like the flavor so much I'd be looking for a replacement. BUT, I think I MAY have even found a solution to the cracking problem! When I go on vacation I always take a box of MY tomatoes with me, and in the past most of the SunGolds cracked right when I picked them, and even many of the ones I put in the box to take seemed to crack--sooner or later! This year I stood and Glared at then for a while, trying to figure out what to do--but I REALLY wanted some with me so I finally decided to cut off the whole "clusters" of tomatoes, which included many ripe ones and others ranging from near ripe to mostly green. There are a LOT of tomatoes on each SunGold cluster! I packed them carefully in the box, fully expecting them to split when I pulled them off the "cluster" but found, to my amazement, that when I started "picking" them, they weren't splitting! So I don't know what made the difference--is has to have something to do with the lack of water available after I cut them, but they rarely split if they've been cut from the vine with "stem" still attached, and then kept that way for "a while" before they're removed from the stem! I will be experimenting this year to see how long you need to wait to prevent the splitting! I started harvesting all my cherries like that after vacation last year, but there wasn't enough time left in the growing season to come to any good conclusions. My Must Have red cherry is Sweet Baby Girl, but that won't help here, again, because I'm sure it's not available as a plant! Even the seed is somewhat hard to find! But Sweet Baby Girl, IMO, has a GREAT flavor (not the same as SunGold), and it does NOT crack! Almost never! Don't remember why I tried that one, but I sure am glad I did! Interestingly, I have "discussed" SBG with Digit recently, and he said he had grown it too, but described a small plant that could be grown in a pot. NOT the same thing I have! Mine get over 6' tall and would EAT a pot! I'm sure we're not talking about growing conditions in this case, and we apparently got seed for two different things! From Digit's list Yellow Pear was one of the very first cherries I tried--I think because I remembered growing it when I was a kid--but for me it was a complete catastrophe! I DID get tomatoes, but they were mushy and mostly flavorless! They were bad enough that I didn't even eat most of them--threw them in the trash! Home grown tomatoes--in the trash! I don't believe even the good Illinois Dirt they were grown in when I was a kid could explain the difference in this case, so I don't know why they were so bad, but I will not be wasting time with them again. I haven't seen this linked around here for a while, and I recently managed to find it again after losing everything to the hard drive crash, so here is a link to the Cornell Tomato Base. It's set to list them by DTM (you need to scroll past the ones that don't have DTM listed), but you can change it to look them up by ratings or variety name or some other things! The ratings come from Real Life people who have grown them! On this list SunGold is rated 4.5, Sweet Baby Girl is 4.0, Black (and Chocolate) Cherry is 4.0, Sweet 100, Sweet Million, and Super Sweet 100 are all 4.0. you can check out the specific comments about each if you click on the individual varieties! Like Bonnie/Lucky, I've had problems with Mortgage Lifter! I had grown it in the past with no luck at all, but wound up growing it again this year since, in my search for the perfect yellow/orange, I had neglected to buy seed for some new red varieties! This year I finally did get some tomatoes off of it, and they were large and pretty flavorful, but they were very late, and it definitely had the hiccups when it got hot out! I'll "keep it on the back burner" but will be testing out some new ones this year. Bloody Butcher, another one that came highly recommended around here, suffered a TOTAL Failure to Thrive for me, and I never got any tomatoes at all off of it--but there are definitely other folks around here who LOVE it! Another highly recommended one here, Thessaloniki, did very little for me. Grew it twice and both times I got VERY few small tomatoes and I rated the flavor as: very average! Others in our area swear by it! Had tried Kellogg's Breakfast in the past and not gotten much/anything but decided to give it another whirl this past year and I did, pretty late, get some big and pretty tasty tomatoes, but Earl of Edgecombe was better and more productive. It'll be another of my Back Burner ones for possible future reconsideration! So, in my opinion, I guess the moral of the story--with or without The Pelting--is that you really just need to try different varieties and figure out which are going to work the best for you, and which ones have the flavor you like best. Taste is a very subjective thing, and while reading reviews might help a LITTLE bit, the best review comes from your tongue and your sense of smell! I still very much recommend you go with more than just one, Aloha, because if you just grow one and happen to get one that flops, or that just doesn't Tickle Your Taste Buds, you might decide they're not at all worth growing--and they are SO, sosososo, worth growing, even with the yearly catastrophes we all experience! Still picking a few tomatoes from last year, Skybird P.S. If you check the drop-down menu under "crop," the Cornell site has listings and ratings for WAY more than just tomatoes!. Here is a link that might be useful: Cornell Tomato Base

I am growing and have grown 6 varieties of heirlooms. The winner is Cherokee Purple with potato leaf Red Brandywine a distant second. There is a reason as to why the Cherokee is the number 1 selling seed and that is Flavor. It is also the most difficult to grow but really not impossible. My techniques. Grow in 5 gallon buckets,dark sandy loam soil. I get my soil from the top inch of earth below pine and oak trees. Objective is pH of soil. I also increase the acidity of soil by applying powered sulphur and large amounts of oak leaves and pine straw. I run a rope thru bottom of bucket up to an 8 ft high bar. This gives me a place to tie branches as they grow and also helps support the weight of the fruit. I use, as directed, Miracle Grow 24-8-16 and apply once per week, 1/2 gallon per plant. When temps reach 90+ I water twice per day, 1/2 gallon of water per plant on each application. Otherwise, 1 gallon of water per day per plant. I place buckets as closely as possible to each other to give fruit as much shade as possible. This almost eliminates cracking and splitting. You end up with a Jungle which makes it difficult to find the fruit. Plants will reach 7 ft high. End results have been high production of fruit on all varieties with very limited splitting. Also apply Iron to each plant on monthly basis. I have 100% sun. Have had a few Cherokee fruits to exceed 1 lb, most are in 10 to 12 ounce size. In tomatoes size does not count, Flavor rules. When you chunk a Cherokee you will have less than a thimble of liquid in bowl.

I grow tomatoes on my two balconies 13 stories up. I usually put two tomatoes and stake them with mop or broom handles (get them from our refuse rooms) in the large pots. In a smaller pot I just put one tomato plant in. I use lots of Miracle Gro soil and liquid fertilizer, and have had very good luck on a sunny balcony. The biggest problem is wind so they have to be staked very well. I have had good luck in the four zone with Early Girl tomatoes. They aren't as big as some of the garden tomatoes but they do very well in pots with my method of gardening on a balcony apartment. The pests seem to leave them alone too. I love the Italian paste tomatoes but they have a tendency to get some tomato disease. Also have had good luck with the small baby tomatoes that hang down off my window boxes that are on my balcony railings. I hope this helps you out. Good luck this summer in your gardening endeavors.