I've grown them all, except for Goose Creek and Big Beef, and of course I'm indicating my opinion only based on where I grow tomatoes, but also for most of them the many areas in The US where they grow tomatoes. Goose Creek Germaid Red, a nice red but there others I prefer Tidwell German , excellent very large pink beef, very good taste, excellent production for such a large fruited variety Large Pink Bulgarian , large pink beef, one of my faves, outstanding taste and production Grandfather Ashlock, another large pink beef, fruits up to 2# if happy, wonderful balanced taste and my production was always great but some other have said otherwise. Bear Claw, another large pink beef, forgettable IMO b'c I think there are much better ones Erica d'Australie, at last a red, nice red fruits, they seem to concentrate at the bottom of the plant, vigorous and usually good production with very good taste. Olena Ukrainian, another large pink beefsteak, PL, excelllent taste, somewhat on the sweet side and production is also good. Big Beef So where's the great reds? LOL Nice to see that three of them are ones I introduced via SSE listings. Always good to see some of my tomato kids do well. I can't comment more specifically about taste b'c that's a personal and perceptive trait and can vary widely amongst folks. And in addition, where a variety is grown, how it's grown, what amendments are used and what the weather is in any one season are also variables. Carolyn

I"m sure there's a lot of smart people here that know a lot more about plants and house plants than I do but to say that "If you have gnats, there's a 99% chance your plants are suffering from excess water retention", just isn't true. I've had the same 28 house plants for 5-15 years (depending on the plant) and all are thriving. I've only had a Dracaena die on me a few years ago due to my water quality i believe but it certainly wasn't root rot. Last July, a friend of mine gave me this amazing Philodendron Micans becuase he was leaving the country. Shortly after getting the plant, my wife and I went away for 10 days. We came back to fungus gnats. I immediatley quarantined the new Micans and completely changed the soil but it was too late. Many of my other plants, including plants i run very dry like ZZ, hoya, snake plant had fungus gnats. I've never had a fungus gnat issue in the past so i really didn't now what to do. Like many people, I tried using BT and yellow sticky tape combo (the rememdy that many poeple are recommending), Bonide systemic granules, hydrogen peroxide, diatamacious earth, neem oil and nothing worked. I tried completely drying out my soil and again, fungus gnats came back weeks later. After hours of gnat research, I read about someone with a similar problem and she said to cover the drainange holes in all your plants and cover the top layer of soil with sand. It appears that fungus gnats are skilled at finding any moist soil, top or bottom so they can and will use your drainage holes to lay their eggs. Their eggs can also lay dormant for many weeks in dry soil and then hatch again when you water your plant so drying out your soil, even the top two inches bone dry, doesn't always work. So no, it doesn't take just poorly drained plants to make fungus gnats happy. Poorly drained soil certainly helps them thrive but they will thrive just fine even in slighly damp, properly draining soil. I was desperate and I really hated covering my soil with sand and wil likely remove it at some point but i'm happy to report, i've been fungus gnat free for about 2.5 months and all plants are doing fine. You have to make it impossible for any gnat to gain access or escape from your plant's soil. This will break the life cycle. Hopefully this is helpful to anyone else looking for a gnat solution. (And there's no sign that my plants are under any additional stress due to the sand compacting the soil undernearth. I used about 1/4 - 1/2 inch of sand, just don't go too crazy with the sand and you will also have to slow down your watering because the water pools temporarily on the top of the sand before it is absorbed and reaches the soil underneath)

I've found that regular white LED bulbs work as good, maybe slightly better than red+blue LED lights. It's true that red+blue can theoretically be more efficient, but with most of the cheap red+blue grow lights out there, I don't think they will really be that much more efficient than a cheap white LED bulb. In any case, efficiency gets kind of irrelevant when your plants can benefit from the extra heat. (All lights are actually 100% efficient, it's just that some of them convert more of that energy to heat rather than light than others) So to rephrase this another way, it would make no sense to use a "more efficient" light if an electric heater was also being used at the same time. Anyway, there's some reason to believe that using a mix of red+blue and white together may be better than either alone, so you could always save some money that way. I've had a tropical camellia species do extremely well under just a 5000K white LED bulb, and citrus has also done well under just white light.

A burn would typically show up on the tips of the leaves or would brown the entire leaf and or the entire plant. I see this tan tissue condition from time to time in my orangery room and it is always on the plants or leaves closest to the overhead light source or window. It is called Mesophyll collapse Identification tip: Soft tissue between leaf veins becomes sunken and translucent or pale due to moisture stress when trees are unable to provide leaves with enough water; affected leaf tissue then becomes tan-colored or necrotic. Citrus can adjust to poor growing conditions indoors for a while. They can put out new shoots, flowers, and fruit but over time indoor deficiencies catch up and the plant will consume itself. Certainly oxygen stress can trigger water stress but indoors humidity stress, heat stress, and sunlight stress contribute to water stress in an equal or greater way and can't be fixed by changing the water schedule or media. Growing citrus is like an orchestra, if one musician is out of key the other ensemble can't play harder to fix the problem.