I still have 4 sets of seeds that have not been claimed. If you requested seeds and did not send an SASE yet, please let me know right away whether or not you still want them. If anyone else would like seeds, drop me a line. Thanks! --Rr

Sheri, I'm sure they were packed in. When I read the book, I was amazed at how many plants he had in a small space....and he was doing it in a colder zone than ours (Colorado). Tomato mania makes people do crazy things. Caspian Pink usually makes 5 or 6 feet in height easily before the killer summer heat slows it down and it really spreads OUT a lot too. After a while, it has grown so far beyond the cage that you cannot tell it even has a cage. By contrast, Cherokee Purple gets as tall in my garden, but not as wide and bushy. I think the duckies probably did greatly enrich the soil as they decomposed, so maybe that is why the spot seems to be a prime spot for growing tomatoes. I've had lots of blooms and fruitset, but the heat did slow everything down some I think. Now that the wind has backed off some (although I think it returns here either today or tomorrow), the plants are looking a lot better, and yesterday's inch of rain helped. One thing I have noticed this year that seems peculiar (maybe it is the weather) is that a lot of my plants have had more megablooms than usual. I know megablooms are common early in the growing season, but so far they continue to pop up here and there. (I guess if I was trying to grow giant competition/exhibition tomatoes, I'd be thrilled to have all the megablooms.) I have 5 paste tomatoes that have looked bad the last few days, and I finally realized they must have been hit by some Round-up drift when I was spraying the garden fenceline near them with Round-up to kill the bermuda grass that was trying to creep through the fence and into the garden. This week I am going to lay down cardboard and cover it with mulch along that fenceline, because I have a persistent bermuda grass problem there, and don't want to use Round-up again. I think the plants will recover as only the top few inches were affected. For some reason, all my Roma tomato plants are much larger than usual this year and I can't imagine why. They are in some of the worst soil in the garden, they were shaded by a willow tree that was growing on the banks of the retention pond at the northeast edge of the garden (DH cut that tree down Sunday), and they haven't gotten any special attention. I guess they thrive on neglect. In any season, I have found that tomato plant varieties can behave completely differently from what they did the year before, and can even behave differently from another plant of the same variety planted right next to them. When I comment on that, my DH reminds me that plants are like children--each one is a unique living creature, and that each sibling in a human family is different from the others, just like the plants. He has a good point! Dawn

I'm looking for either bell peppers or sweet peppers. I never really liked them but a friend of mine bought a package from costco and told me to try them raw. I was like really? So I tried it and they tasted great. Sweet and with the bell pepper taste so I want to try my hand at growing some :) I bought 2 sweet peppers from Home depot. Does anyone know if I can save seeds from those plants? Email me at splitsec002@hotmail.com so we can do a trade or if you don't have what I'm looking for I can still send you some seeds.

And when you post in the Seed exchange as Dave noted I do wish you'd clarify what you mean by Mexican Dwarfs. There are indet and det, and semi-det varieties but true Dwarf varieties have rugose foliage and a very think main stem and I'd be surprised if there were any Mexican Dwarfs. Just my opinion. Carolyn