I'm going to restrict my comments to tomatoes that you might be able to find as transplants, since that's what you're looking for. What I have liked: Amelia has worked well for me, lasted a long time through disease pressure, good fruit. I grew one of the BHN tomatoes (I can't remember which one it was) with results similar to Amelia. Better Boy: My mom and lots of people around here swear by Better Boy, but I have not personally grown it. Solar Set is kind of iffy - the fruit were small for slicers and the flavor was just okay. It did set fruit in the heat as advertised, though. Cherry/Grape Tomatoes: If you like cherry/grape tomatoes, a lot of them do really well - they handle the diseases better than most of the big tomatoes and set better in the heat. Sweet 100 or Sweet Million are commonly available reds and usually do well. For yellows, I like SunSugar, but have to grow it from seed - you might be able to find the similar SunGold as a transplant, though. Once it really gets going, one plant usually supplies all the cherry tomatoes my family can eat, all summer and into fall. A cherry tomato will become a huge sprawling plant if you let it, but you can harvest hundreds and hundreds of tasty little gems from one plant over the course of a season. What I haven't liked: Celebrity never did well for me, either! I thought it was just me, since everyone sells that one. Roma has always been mediocre-tasting for me, just bland. Works okay for sauces (cooking concentrates what flavor it has), but blah for salsas. Yield has been erratic. I am trying to find a better paste variety. Bush Goliath was a big disappointment. It made a very healthy-looking plant with lots of blooms, but very little fruit set and it had huge problems with fruit rot when no other tomatoes I planted that year did. (I wonder if that's because the fruit it did manage to set was in the very middle of the plant surrounded by dense foliage? By "surrounded" I mean that the few fruit that did ripen were really hard to pick without breaking branches - there was no way to get a hand in there or get the tomatoes out!) My mom had the same experience. To be fair, both our plants came from seeds that I started in the same year, so maybe it was a bad batch? The few fruit we got were pretty good, but I haven't been inclined to try it again. Brandywine grew into a huge plant quickly, but set almost no fruit. The fruit it did set were early - didn't set at all in the heat. Apparently the bugs, birds, and squirrels think it's tasty, too. Both years I tried it, it was always attacked first by everything. I got two fruits one year and none the next, and it was the first to succumb to disease in midsummer. I have to say the two tomatoes I did get were some of the best tomatoes I've ever had. I just don't have the space for a big plant that is going to produce little or no fruit, no matter how good it is. YMMV, but I hope this helps!

I'm working compost in this weekend and letting my beds go fallow, locked down under black plastic for the next several weeks to chase away nematodes and block the weeds. Will start my tomato seeds in about 9 days for transplanting out in the beds in mid-August. I'll also start broccolli seeds in August (and will continue starting seeds every two weeks through October so that I'll have a continual supply through the winter). Corn and beans will be direct sown in early August. Lettuce, onions, carrots and strawberries will start in October. I agree with you on the citrus. It'll be a bumper crop as long as we don't have any disasterous weather. My trees are absolutely covered. I just finished the last of my peaches. Man, they sure beat the hell out of anything you can get at the store.

I'd really been wondering when the redbuds would show that first blush of color and finally .... just in the last day or two, they are showing up along the roadsides. A deer visited a few days ago and snacked on some of my tulips :( but the ones that are left are beginning to bloom and they are beautiful! Phlox is now blooming and the hostas are growing fast. I'm now pretty sure that the tree that I thought might be a crabapple is just that, and it looks like another small tree is a redbud (yay). It's fun discovering what's growing here, now that the weather has finally decided to warm up. A neighbor said 12 wild turkeys were in our yard the other day, but we were at work so we missed seeing them. The street we live on is called Turkey Run Drive, so now we now how it got its name :). Oh, and one bit of good news .... they started the dirt work where the building will go, and when they stripped off the bermuda grass the land is mostly nice dirt, with only one little strip of red clay running through it. This may have once been farmland, or a pasture. So that's good news for the vegetable garden. Suzie

The advantages of planting most perennials, shrubs, and trees (in our zone) in early to mid fall is slight compared to planting them in early to mid spring. In colder climates, it's often best to wait until spring to plant. If you are planting a fast growing or top-heavy deciduous tree or shrub, fall might give the roots time to get more well established before the plant experiences wind that could push the tree, with a smaller root ball, over. Basically, plant at whichever time is more convient to YOU. If you plant them correctly and water them until they get established either time (in this climate zone) would work just great.