I'm near Pasadena, so I think I'm 9a? Last October I planted one nursery-bought "Jet Setter" in October. The plant pooped along all winter(no cover), giving an occasional mater but nothing special. Came spring it really took off. It started pumping out big quantity in May and there is still no sign of stopping. The maters are about 4-5 oz, round, well-balanced. I'm starting a cutting now. If the cutting doesn't take off I'll buy a seeding in September. I also had a volunteer Sweet 100 that started late. But it produced all winter. Every few days there was enough to go with the lettuce. I'm also going to try a winter zucchini this year. Digital Seed calendar says to do it in December but I think I'll plant the seed in October. My garden is not as busy or crowded in winter, so I figuer why not plant one or two to try?

Susan, I have no idea about the availability of seedlings for fall planting in the OKC metro area since I don't live or shop there (mileage-wise, the Dallas-Fort Worth area is much closer for me). Maybe someone who lives in that area will see this and tell you where they get their fall tomato plants if they aren't raising them from seed. I raise mine from seed and it's very easy at this time of year. I sow the seed in recycled 6-packs that held flower transplants purchased this spring and I raise them outside in full sun. That eliminates the whole issue of hardening them off because they grow in full sun and full heat from the very start. I have found that raising them this way gives me very tough transplants that don't mind being transplanted in the worst summer weather. Of course, those six packs must be watered at least twice a day and that might be impossible for you with Jess about to give birth because I'm sure you'll be busy helping her in those first few weeks when no one gets enough sleep or rest. I have no idea how transplants would ship in the summer because I've never ordered tomato transplants, but I'd assume they might do alright. Otherwise, reputable firms like Selected Plants wouldn't ship them for fall planting. The three sources for tomatoes in Oklahoma that I know about and which are most likely to have a great selection for fall tomatoes are The Tomatoman's Daughter and Duck Creek Farms in the Tulsa area and Sunrise Farms in Blanchard. They all have websites and you might check those website and see if they have fall transplants available and, if so, then when and also see if they have a variety listing of what they expect to have for fall. I would assume that there are some vendors at the OKC Farmer's Market that do indeed offer transplants for fall planting, but don't know how you could find that out now, other than to ask around while you're at the market. I've never seen SunGold or Black Cherry or most the others on my list available anywhere here in southern OK or northcentral Texas. That's why I grow from seed....if you want specific varieties at specific times, the only guaranteed way to have them is to grow your own. Otherwise you're restricted to whatever the retailers are offering. The selection here is always the same old, same old stuff and I seldom see anything I want offered for fall planting, with the exception of a couple of the heat-setting types like Solar Fire or Spitfire. That's one of the main reasons I started raising my own from seed years ago---because I wanted to grow heirlooms and no one sold heirloom transplants at the time, so I had to grow them myself. My late plantings tend to get just as big as my early plantings because they grow really fast in hot weather and we have lots of hot weather. It all depends though on how quickly the weather cools in the fall. I think that if the temperatures allow, fall tomatoes set fruit earlier than the DTMs would suggest....and believe it probably is because of all the heat and the long daylength when they're transplanted. The fall tomatoes get off to a faster start in warmer conditions than those the spring tomatoes have to deal with when they're transplanted into relatively cool soil and are exposed to relatively cool nighttime temps and fewer hours of daylight per day. Dawn

Britt, I'm relieved to hear that you repotted them. Do you remember more or less when you planted the tomatoes in the containers to begin with? I sort of think you ought to be getting ripe tomatoes by the end of June if you got fruit set in early May, but it could be later than that because the act of repotting them would have set them back for a week or two merely because the roots were disturbed. It doesn't pay to compare your tomato development and harvest to anyone else's because we all have different soil conditions, different weather conditions, different amounts of sunlight and different varieties growing so none of us will have exactly the same results. All that comparing your tomatoes to someone else's will do for you is drive you mad. I realize that it is human nature to read the different threads here and said "OMG, so-and-so is already getting ripe tomatoes and so is so-and-so", but this is a big state with highly variable soils and weather and even people who live a mile or two from each other can have very different results from plants that were transplanted into the ground or their containers at the same time. Let me try to put it into perspective for you by describing how long it has taken my tomatoes to fruit, and I have varieties with DTMs (which are estimates only and not engraved in stone) that range from 49 days to about 80-85 days. I bought a handful of large tomato plants in 5" peat pots at a store in Dallas in about the third week of February, and put them into containers and got ripe tomatoes from them beginning the last week of April, and that was with a lot of rainfall and decent weather, though I had to protect them from a few cold nights---though not too many cold nights as our last frost here was March 5th, I think. So, that was about two months from transplantation to fruit with the earliest ones to produce, and some of the later ones in that bunch didn't produce their first ripe fruit for another 3 weeks...or almost three months from transplanting to harvest. With tomato plants in the ground, I started putting them into the ground March 12th, and continued putting a new batch into the ground about every 7-10 days through the first week in May. How many of those have produced so far? Well, the big production has come from plants that went into the ground March 12th and 13th, and from the two rows that went into the ground in late March. The plants that went into the ground in early April have not produced much fruit yet--just a handful of paste tomatoes, but they are heavily loaded with green fruit that I expect will begin to ripen in the next week or two. The plants that went into the ground from mid-April through earliest May have green fruit (or blue fruit in the case of Indigo Rose)--some have a little, some have a lot, but I don't expect a harvest from them at all until July. So, maybe seeing how long it takes my plants to produce in comparison to when they were planted will give you some insight into whether yours are slow to produce...or not. One thing about growing tomatoes in containers that can be problematic is that it doesn't take them very long to get too dry and it is easy for them to become malnourished since every time you water or every time it rains the nutrients wash out of the soil along with the excess moisture. Thus, the biggest challenge with container tomatoes is keeping them evenly moist and well-fed. I have grown tomatoes in 5-gallon buckets. I did it for a long time as I slowly amassed bigger planters, and I don't think I'll ever go back to growing the indeterminate types in 5-gallon buckets again because it requires so much watering. You can get a good harvest from them, but the hotter the weather gets, the harder it is to keep them producing heavily. Sometimes, in a mild spring, the ones in 5-gallon buckets produce earlier than the ones in the ground, but generally once the weather is hotter, they slow down tremendously, and you might recall that the weather in May was abnormally hot and dry in much of the state. I'm linking a website that shows the progression of a Big Beef tomato truss from bloom to ripe fruit, and in fact beyond that point to overly ripe fruit. Look at those photos and note how long the tomato stayed pretty much its mature size before it broke color and began to ripen. Growing tomatoes will teach you patience, and probably a few other things besides that. I say that with a smile on my face. I've been growing tomatoes for as long as I can remember dating back to being a young child following my dad around the yard and garden in the 1960s, and there still are times when their behavior drives me nuts. This year I felt like the plants that went into the ground March 12th=13th never were going to ripen. They probably weren't really late to ripen considering how hard the May weather was on them, but I was really getting impatient, so I do understand exactly how you feel. As for the yellow leaves, look at them carefully because yellowing foliage can indicate a variety of issues, including some diseases. If you're seeing brown, black or purplish patches on the yellow leaves, we probably need to talk about disease issues. Having said that, yellowing foliage is very common on tomato plants at this time of year because stress causes yellowing of leaves too, so just the fact that the leaves are yellow does not necessarily mean they are diseased--it just means they are stressed. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Timeline of A Tomato Truss

Jay, Our heat continues unabated, but not quite as consistently hot as yours perhaps. It is 100 degrees here right now, but we started out at 73, so at least I was out picking corn in decent temperatures early this morning. There's no rain in our 7-day forecast, which made Tim say "what?". He watched the news a couple of days ago and they had us at a 10-30% rain chance for 3 or 4 days or nights, and then abruptly, the next morning, all that was gone from the forecast. I told him "Silly man, you cannot trust the forecast!" lol I hope your nights are dropping cool enough to allow fruitset. I had tomato, pepper, bean and cucumber blooms during the recent cool spell, but haven't watched the tomato or pepper plants closely enough to know if the flowers fertilized and formed fruit or not. I've been so busy with the harvest that my mind can only focus each day on harvesting/eating/preserving whatever it is that absolutely, positively must be picked today. I'm actually staying more caught up than last year, but not on the canning tomatoes. A lot of them are new plant trials and I can see they are loaded with fruit, but haven't managed to catch up enough yet on the peppers and cukes to have time to evaluate the tomatoes. Tomorrow is supposed to be a tomato day. We'll see. Today was going to be the big tomato day. I was going to harvest all the paste types and process them, but then I noticed just before dark last night that the 4th and 5th succession plantings of corn were ready to be harvested, so it turned into a big corn day instead. I'll just do the tomatoes tomorrow. In that way that Mother Nature has of messing up your plans, my five carefully-planned and timed succession plantings of corn all more or less caught up with each other and ripened in rapid succession so I would barely have time to finish harvesting one variety and then the next one would be ready. Sometimes I get a week or two between harvesting each successive variety, but not this year. The raccoons didn't get a single ear. It's been a long time since I could say that. Okra can be so vexing. This year, for the first time in ages, I had voles get into the big garden. Apparently the tall fence that keeps out the deer also keeps out the bobcats and the voles have figured that out. They ate all the okra plants (why?) and all but two sweet potatoes and most of two beds of Irish potatoes. I resowed okra seed and got 2 plants. However, little volunteers came up in the area where I grew okra last year and the year before, so I dug up and moved the volunteers and they are performing better than the ones I raised from seed sown directly in the garden. Our pet cats usually control the voles, moles and gophers well in the yard and the garden, but since the cats are inside the house at night for safety reasons, the voles are having a field day in the garden. It just figures that the volunteers are growing better than the plants from seed I sowed, so now, when a volunteer pops up, I leave it wherever it pops up since it now is too hot to dig up and move any seedlings. Stewart's Zeebest does really well for me in a wet year, but not so much in a dry year. I think that since it was selected/perfected in the Houston area, it clearly prefers more rainfall that I can give it....and it must be wondering how it ended up in your dry garden. (grin) I started used buckwheat as a cover crop or even as a companion planting about 3 years ago. I like to plant it near winter squash and pumpkins at the same time I plant them or within a month of planting them. It seems to attract a lot of beneficial insects, and I think they help control the pests that normally attack cucurbits. This fall I am going to use clover as a winter cover crop. I've been in cucumber and squash heaven, but the cantaloupes have been slow to set fruit. They have lots of flowers, though, so it is just a matter of time. I planted an excessive amount of pickling cukes so I could make lots of Zesty Bread and Butter Pickles (a Mrs. Wages mix) to give as Christmas gifts and that has worked out well. Usually the cucumber beetles have spread bacterial wilt around by now and the cukes are failing, but so far that hasn't happened this year. It is funny how much you and I think alike sometimes. Expecting the continuation of drought (which has occurred), I didn't want to have to water everything all summer long so I planned and planted accordingly, and zoned together the plants I felt worthy of summer watering so I can water them and not the others. Abhorring empty ground, though, I've been sowing either flower seed (mostly sunflowers and zinnias) or southern peas ('we don't need no stinkin' irrigation') in empty beds after a crop has been harvested. It is easier for me to shut off the valve on the drip lines for beds of flowers or southern peas than for most other crops, so I can abandon them more easily than I can abandon tomato plants or pepper plants. So far, this has been a pretty typical summer, but it feels really "easy" compared to the last two summers. My tomato plants are a mixed bag, mostly because a bunch of them got hit when somebody spilled a herbicide in the road in front of our house. No one came knocking on the door to say "oops", but we suddenly had a big dead patch of grass about 20' x 20' in the grass alongside the road just a bit north of the driveway and mailbox. Before Tim noticed the dead grass and asked me about it, I'd already seen the telltale signs of 2-4-d damage on about 30 tomato plants. I feel like the herbicide drift that originally hit them came from that spill, but then two more times since then, random plants have suddenly been damaged. The important thing is that the plants are producing tomatoes, but the plants themselves look really awful. I hate to even stand at look at them. They aren't up to my usual standards for appearance, but the fruit are still tasty. Next year all the tomato plants likely will go into the new garden area north of the barn. I might be able to keep them safe from herbicide drift from at least the east and south since the house and garage, as well as the trees and shrubs planted nearby, might block them from herbicide drift from those two directions at least. When you live in an area with lots of agriculture.....well, herbicide drift just happens sometimes. I am still waiting for you to declare that grafting is "worth it" and then I will try it. I'm not in any big hurry though. My springs always seem overly complicated anyhow and I'm worried I won't have time to graft tomato plants. I like coconut fiber and have added it to some of my container plants. I think it makes a huge difference. The one thing that worries me is that in a wet year it might hold too much moisture, but we haven't really had a wet year since I discovered it. Because I planted pretty early and covered up the plants on cold nights, we have had an excellent harvest and I've been busy making salsa and also pickles. Now that the heat is setting in and getting fairly hot, I'll likely cut back my garden time to only early morning harvesting, and minimal watering, weeding and mulching. I like to hibernate in the air-conditioned house as much as possible in July and August. I bought fall tomato plants from Bonnie Plants. I wasn't in the mood to sow seed and raise them this year, so the fall plants won't be anything special. If I hit "tomato burnout" stage early enough in the year, as I have this year, I find it hard to get enthusiastic about fall tomatoes. However, I always plant them because the plants that still look good right now might not look too great a month from now and, if that is the case, I'll be glad I have the new fall tomato plants. I love my garden, but I've canned about 90 jars of "stuff" this week and have frozen an equivalent amount, and I think I need a vacation from the garden---not that I am likely to get one. Dawn