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!

Game on! Let the Tomato Wars begin! LOL! I cracked up when I read your post, Bonnie--a/k/a HighAlt! I decided a few years ago that the biggest problem with growing tomatoes is finding out what works for YOU. I've been getting recommendations here for what to try ever since I got this house and had a place to grow veggies, and sometimes they do well, and sometimes they totally flop! I don't think there was anything wrong with the recommendations for the ones that flopped, I just think the people recommending them had different growing conditions from me. I still haven't found a red that's on my Must Have list, but I did FINALLY find a yellow/orange last year that will most likely be found in my garden into perpetuity! This won't help on this thread because I'm sure it's not available as a plant, but if anyone is wondering, it's Earl of Edgecombe. Set fruit the earliest of my large tomatoes and didn't seem to be much phased by heat--and large flavorful tomatoes. Ripened well when cut and hung in the garage too! It's a keeper for me--but who knows how well it would grow for someone else! But the thing that really cracked me up, HighAlt, was your recommendations for cherries! Hmmm! Too bad we're too far away from each other to do some Pelting! ;-) On the recommendation of several people around here I tried Black Cherry in '08, and I didn't find them to have much flavor at all (Who's gonna do the Pelting now!) For me they also took a LONG time to ripen, and they seemed to ripen just a few at a time, so I never really got a large amount to gorge on at any one time--unlike SunGold. I do totally agree that SunGold has a cracking problem, and if I didn't like the flavor so much I'd be looking for a replacement. BUT, I think I MAY have even found a solution to the cracking problem! When I go on vacation I always take a box of MY tomatoes with me, and in the past most of the SunGolds cracked right when I picked them, and even many of the ones I put in the box to take seemed to crack--sooner or later! This year I stood and Glared at then for a while, trying to figure out what to do--but I REALLY wanted some with me so I finally decided to cut off the whole "clusters" of tomatoes, which included many ripe ones and others ranging from near ripe to mostly green. There are a LOT of tomatoes on each SunGold cluster! I packed them carefully in the box, fully expecting them to split when I pulled them off the "cluster" but found, to my amazement, that when I started "picking" them, they weren't splitting! So I don't know what made the difference--is has to have something to do with the lack of water available after I cut them, but they rarely split if they've been cut from the vine with "stem" still attached, and then kept that way for "a while" before they're removed from the stem! I will be experimenting this year to see how long you need to wait to prevent the splitting! I started harvesting all my cherries like that after vacation last year, but there wasn't enough time left in the growing season to come to any good conclusions. My Must Have red cherry is Sweet Baby Girl, but that won't help here, again, because I'm sure it's not available as a plant! Even the seed is somewhat hard to find! But Sweet Baby Girl, IMO, has a GREAT flavor (not the same as SunGold), and it does NOT crack! Almost never! Don't remember why I tried that one, but I sure am glad I did! Interestingly, I have "discussed" SBG with Digit recently, and he said he had grown it too, but described a small plant that could be grown in a pot. NOT the same thing I have! Mine get over 6' tall and would EAT a pot! I'm sure we're not talking about growing conditions in this case, and we apparently got seed for two different things! From Digit's list Yellow Pear was one of the very first cherries I tried--I think because I remembered growing it when I was a kid--but for me it was a complete catastrophe! I DID get tomatoes, but they were mushy and mostly flavorless! They were bad enough that I didn't even eat most of them--threw them in the trash! Home grown tomatoes--in the trash! I don't believe even the good Illinois Dirt they were grown in when I was a kid could explain the difference in this case, so I don't know why they were so bad, but I will not be wasting time with them again. I haven't seen this linked around here for a while, and I recently managed to find it again after losing everything to the hard drive crash, so here is a link to the Cornell Tomato Base. It's set to list them by DTM (you need to scroll past the ones that don't have DTM listed), but you can change it to look them up by ratings or variety name or some other things! The ratings come from Real Life people who have grown them! On this list SunGold is rated 4.5, Sweet Baby Girl is 4.0, Black (and Chocolate) Cherry is 4.0, Sweet 100, Sweet Million, and Super Sweet 100 are all 4.0. you can check out the specific comments about each if you click on the individual varieties! Like Bonnie/Lucky, I've had problems with Mortgage Lifter! I had grown it in the past with no luck at all, but wound up growing it again this year since, in my search for the perfect yellow/orange, I had neglected to buy seed for some new red varieties! This year I finally did get some tomatoes off of it, and they were large and pretty flavorful, but they were very late, and it definitely had the hiccups when it got hot out! I'll "keep it on the back burner" but will be testing out some new ones this year. Bloody Butcher, another one that came highly recommended around here, suffered a TOTAL Failure to Thrive for me, and I never got any tomatoes at all off of it--but there are definitely other folks around here who LOVE it! Another highly recommended one here, Thessaloniki, did very little for me. Grew it twice and both times I got VERY few small tomatoes and I rated the flavor as: very average! Others in our area swear by it! Had tried Kellogg's Breakfast in the past and not gotten much/anything but decided to give it another whirl this past year and I did, pretty late, get some big and pretty tasty tomatoes, but Earl of Edgecombe was better and more productive. It'll be another of my Back Burner ones for possible future reconsideration! So, in my opinion, I guess the moral of the story--with or without The Pelting--is that you really just need to try different varieties and figure out which are going to work the best for you, and which ones have the flavor you like best. Taste is a very subjective thing, and while reading reviews might help a LITTLE bit, the best review comes from your tongue and your sense of smell! I still very much recommend you go with more than just one, Aloha, because if you just grow one and happen to get one that flops, or that just doesn't Tickle Your Taste Buds, you might decide they're not at all worth growing--and they are SO, sosososo, worth growing, even with the yearly catastrophes we all experience! Still picking a few tomatoes from last year, Skybird P.S. If you check the drop-down menu under "crop," the Cornell site has listings and ratings for WAY more than just tomatoes!. Here is a link that might be useful: Cornell Tomato Base

ÂIs it true that winter rye cleans the soil of destructive nematodes, or adds beneficial nematodes, can't remember which.....? **** No, not true. Ebon rye has been suggested as a cover crop that might help lower the population of pathogenic nematodes. But I have many friends, especially in CA, who have bad Root Knot Nematode problems and several in the past have done controlled experiments with Ebon rye and found little to no difference. No, it doesn't encourage beneficial nematodes. Ppod, you don't have RKN problems where you live and you know I know where you live. LOL About TMV. As Dave said the strains of tobacco grown in the US , and that's at least for the past 20 years or so, are TMV tolerant. But Turkish tobacco is not TMV tolerant. Sudzy, in any case TMV is transmitted, or was, primarily by insects and these days any transmission is manual and occurs in large commercial greenhouses. But growing in one spot every year is not going to predispose plants to TMV b'c it's not out there to worry about any more. CMV is and many folks confuse TMV with CMV b'c the two viruses can exhibit similar symptoms. Growing in one spot can predispose to a build up of foliage pathogens, but I spoke to that in a post above in this thread. Carolyn