I do enjoy trying different seeds in spring... I have to wait until then to plant anything that requires growing outdoors. Anything I plant now will not make it, because it won't get large enough by the time it begins to get cold. However, I could save seeds until spring... I do love getting seeds to try from my friends! I hope next year is better for my vegetable garden... this season was a bust because of the weather. We did have some nice green beans, several kinds... and our tomatoes are just now beginning to ripen in quantities. If you find anything weird or different, I'd be very happy to try them, thank you, Soultan!

I've found that Aquaponics seems to extend the growing season for tomatoes a bit as does adding some shade for the hottest part of the day during the hottest part of the season. Even so, when the night time temps don't get cool enough, the plants probably won't set fruit but if they are indeterminate, they can just keep growing until the nights cool off and allow them to start setting fruit again. Be prepared for monster plants though and don't be scared to prune hard though that might make for some not so attractive plants. If you want to know about good summer crops for around here, sweet potatoes are good so log as you can provide enough water to them (leaves and vine tips are a handy edible summer green too.) Okra does well in the high heat as do many southerns peas and beans, yardlong beans seem to like the heat (peas and beans can also improve the soil by fixing nitrogen.) I'm trying out Strawberry spinach this summer as well as New Zeland Spinach since I don't like the taste of Malabar spinach though it is an attractive plant. Basil can grow on through the summer if you keep cutting it. Some melons can also do well in the extreme heat at least for a while though when the rains come you might need to watch for splitting. for some light shade mixed through the garden it might be worth planting some moringa or papaya among the garden space though these plants can be killed back to the ground by frost so might not be as useful long term in zone 9 and cooler. Mixing stuff like corn, sunflowers, and other tall stuff into the garden among everything else can help provide some shade and make a small garden more productive than if you simply planted just one type of plant. Mix things up with low growing plants to help cover the ground and keep it cool and moist then some middle level plants and then some tall plants all jumbled together and add some flowers and herbs into the mix and the pests get more confused and the beneficial bugs are attracted and the garden is more productive. Heck, I've still got lettuce surviving in my herb garden and it's been over 93 F here every day for a week!

There's several reasons. 1) Commercial varieties are bred to tolerate shipping. Their skin is a lot tougher than that of home-grown tomatoes, particularly if you are raising heirloom varieties. They also are bred to have a long shelf life so they don't go rotten while they are somewhere in the distribution chain or in the grocery store. They certainly aren't bred for flavor! 2) Commercial fields of tomatoes are harvested by machines while they are green, and therefore, not ripe. They are then washed, sorted, packed and shipped while green. They are exposed to ethylene gas which does, in fact, turn them red so that they look ripe----but they aren't ripe. They were picked green so never developed far enough to actually turn ripe. This is why their flavor never develops....because they never ripen. Artificially turning tomatoes red by exposing them to a specific gas while they are not ripe doesn't ripen them---it just colors them up to trick shoppers into thinking they are ripe. If you smell a red grocery store tomato, where is the aroma of a ripe tomato? It isn't there because that artificially-reddened tomato isn't ripe. I learned everything I just described to you from a wonderful book called "Can You Trust A Tomato in January?" and, as you might guess, the book's answer was "no, you cannot". 3) Commercially grown tomatoes are refrigerated in order to keep them from going bad while they are being distributed to stores and while they are on the store shelves. Refrigeration adversely affects both their texture (it makes them mushy) and their flavor (not that they had good flavor to begin with since they were not allowed to actually ripen). 4) Plant breeding has certain limitations. Breeders use all sorts of genetic manipulations, including deliberately using certain genetic mutations in their breeding programs, to give them the results they seek. Somewhere along the way, a genetic mutation was discovered with a trait the breeders loved. Plants with that mutation ripened all the fruit to a beautiful, uniform, scarlet red. Since all the tomato breeders apparently felt tomatoes only should come in a bright, scarlet red, they began using that gene to give them beautiful red tomatoes. It has been in use for quite a while---for decades. Now, new research, described in the article linked below, has linked poor tomato flavor to the use of that genetic mutation that makes the fruit turn that beautiful scarlet red. Apparently that genetic mutation adversely affects the gene that plays a role in developing sugar and aromas. Without the proper sugar development, flavor suffers. Ha! A lot of us die-hard home gardeners who grow our own so that we can eat tomatoes with great flavor always KNEW in our hearts that they were breeding the true tomato flavor out of modern-day tomatoes. Now we know how and why. I laughed out loud when I read this article a few weeks ago. Just because breeders can breed virtually anything they want into fruit or vegetables doesn't mean that they should. What good is it to breed varieties that give you perfect, round, scarlet red fruit with a very long shelf life if it doesn't have the true texture and taste of a real tomato? What is the point? I've also noticed in recent years that at a certain point in the year, boxes of reddish-orange almost square tomatoes arrive in the stores. They have been bred to have that nearly square shape so that they can fit as many of those things as possible into a shipping box with no wasted space. Flavor? There isn't any. Is it any wonder those poor things taste so bad? The breeders aren't breeding for flavor---they are breeding for a certain color (nothing but red), a certain shape (squareish to fit into boxes most efficiently) and shelf life (they might last forever on the shelves, but I'll never know because I don't buy them). A couple of decades back, a certain company tried to breed a tomato that would last, literally, for months on the store shelves or on your kitchen counter. That didn't really work out very well because they had no flavor, so grocery stores and consumers rejected them. I believe that one was called the McGregor or MacGregor tomato. So, at least at that point in time, the desire for tasty tomatoes did triumph over the breeders' desire to develop a tomato that would set on a shelf forever without going bad. People who think grocery store tomatoes have good flavor and texture usually think that because they've never had real, home-grown tomatoes with great flavor and texture. They've gotten used to eating those mushy, flavorless things....or maybe they just don't care. If you've only ever had grocery store tomatoes, you don't expect that tomatoes would taste any differently from that. Or, maybe their taste buds are dead. When people tell me they don't like tomatoes, my instant response is that I bet they've never eaten anything but grocery store tomatoes. If you can get them to taste a good, tasty, home-grown tomato at the peak of perfection, they suddenly discover they like tomatoes after all....but to get a tomato like that, they will have to learn to grow their own. In the last decade, it has come to the attention of the plant breeders and seed companies that a certain segment of the population (namely home gardeners, market growers who sell at farmer's markets or via CSAs, chefs who treasure food with good flavor and foodies) is growing and eating tasty heirloom tomatoes with a wide variety of flavor profiles and in all kinds of colors including but not limited to red....like orange, yellow, green-when-ripe, purple, pink, black, and in bicolors and tricolors. So, of course, now those breeders and the seed companies have been rushing to give us hybrid tomatoes in various colors that are supposed to be as tasty as the heirlooms they mimic. Well, I'm not buying it. They can develop hybrid fruit in all sorts of colors but I still bet they cannot get the flavor we get in heirloom, open-pollinated fruit. They can give them similar names to popular heirloom, open-pollinated varieties, but I'm not falling for it. They probably could get the true heirloom flavor if they bothered to breed for flavor, but I don't really think they "get it" enough to do that, yet. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Scarlet Red Tomatoes With No Flavor

llaz Quote: "a clove of garlic and two or three anchovies" Garlic and anchovies on a BLT? What were ya thinking, Lou "pizza?" lol For you Lou I found someone who might just agree with you so smitten are they with anchovies they"ve penned an "Ode to the Anchovie" see link below. :D barkeater Quote: "You start with a thick slice of your favorite tomato, up against REAL mayonnaise, with a high quality, crispy bacon, on nonbleached italian white bread. Lettuce is insignificant and use the absolute minimum possible, and add salt and pepper to taste. Anything else is SOMETHING ELSE, not a BLT." YES, YEEESSSSSSSSS, that's it! lol So simply and eloquently stated, too. newbie_2007 Quote: "as many 1/4 inch slices of tom that you can wrap your mouth around (some have bigger jaws than others)" hehe, that's why I'm thinking you should really make your own BLT's who better to judge these things. If someone makes your BLT sandwich TOO big you gotta wonder what is it they are really saying to you, lol trudi_d Quote: "We had a spec book that gave instructions on how to make sandwiches-----we were requred to cut on the diagonal. Great thread, this is the first I've looked at it." LOL, sort of reminds me of cooking in the Army, kinda funny that. Thanks! :) cziga Quote: "I had a BLT (not made by me) the other day that had mustard on one slice of bread and mayo on the other. On no account does mustard belong in a BLT. Not that its a bad condiment, but it obscures the tomato flavor and it altogether a bad idea." Certain taste combinations don't even "sound" good together although I've been meaning to try the Elvis' "banana and peanut butter" sandwich sometime. :D moosemac Quote: "Hubby likes: A thick slice of any large home grown beefesteak tomato, iceberg lettuce, Armour Black Label bacon, Cain's Mayo and Wonderbread toasted golden brown." Brand loyalty (I love it!) and the Wonderbread is an excellent bread for a classic BLT it has no flavor doing what bread should do which is hold ingredients so you can get them to your mouth without too much "fuss & muss". :P Moosemac, just curious but have you tried anchovies with the garlic on your BLT might go good with the cibatta bread, check with Lou, hehe :P Here is a link that might be useful: Ode to the Anchovy