Me too. I have visions of seed packets and seed flats dancing in my head. Yesterday we had some sunshine and it was easy to think spring was closer than it is. Today it has been gray and overcast with a misty, drizzly bit of something falling every now and then, so it is a bit easier to remind myself it is still winter. Everyone who's wanting to jump the gun and start some seeds now, repeat after me...it is still winter, it is still winter, it is still winter. There are several ways to dehydrate tomatoes. I generally do it the simple way. I start picking whichever bite-sized tomatoes are fully ripe. I try to put at least 1 tomato in the bucket for each 1 I put into my mouth. I take the survivors (those are the ones I didn't eat or the ones I didn't drop on the ground and then step on) inside, wash them, drain them and let them drip dry in the colander. I slice them in half, but leave the two halves just barely attached to one another so I can handle two halves at one time when transferring them from the cutting board to the cookie sheet. I line them all up nice and neat, close but not touching (well, the two halves of each tomato touch because they are still attached but they don't touch anything else) on cookie sheets. I place the cut-side up and the skin side down so they'll dry more quickly. My oven has three racks so I generally dry 3 cookie sheets of tomatoes at one time. In general, I'm not an overly "neat" or fussy person, but all my tomato rows on the cookie sheets have to be lined up nice and neat and 'just so'. Why? Just because. I turn on the oven, choose the 'dehydrate' feature and choose my temperature from the available dehyrating options. I get busy doing other stuff and forget about them for a while. Eventually the whole house is scented with the most delicious aroma. Anyone who comes to the house while I'm dehydrating tomatoes doesn't want to leave. They just want to sit there and inhale that fragrant tomatoey aroma. When the tomatoes have been in about one-half as long as I think they'll take to dehydrate (based on prior experience), I start checking them every 30 or 45 minutes. When they have dried down to the right moisture level, I remove them from the dehydrator and let them cool on the cookie sheets. Once they are cool, I put them into quart sized freezer zip-lock bags. I put the quart-sized freezer bags into 1-gallon or 2-gallon freezer bagas, so that I don't have to carry a lot of quart bags to the freezer or deal with them loose in the freezer. I just add more quart bags to a bigger bag in the freezer until the larger zip-lock is full. In a good year, as a minimum I'll put several thousand bite-sized tomatoes into the freezer. In the "off season", I eat them many different ways. Sometimes I eat them in their dried state....just like eating raisins, only their color is prettier (oranges, reds, pinks, yellows instead of brown or golden raisins). I might eat handfuls of them as a snack, or just a handful tossed into a salad. Sometimes I'll put them in a cup or bowl, add water and rehydrate them. Then, we can toss them into a salad or eat as snacks or as a side dish on a plate. Sometimes I'll toss a handful of them into a soup, casserole or even into salsa to make it more "tomatoey". If I am careful and ration them out, I won't run out until maybe March. You can get fancy and marinate them in red wine or some other agent that will give them a good flavor, but the tradeoff is that they are absorbing moisture as they marinate and will take longer to dehydrate. You can drizzle them with extra-virgin olive oil and sprinkle herbs or a little salt on them before you dehydrate them. The ones brushed with olive oil will take a long time to dry. If you dehydrate them down to a low-enough moisture level, you can store them in a cool, dark place like a closet or pantry and not keep them in the freezer. I prefer the freezer though as extra insurance. Since different sizes of tomatoes dry more quickly or more slowly than the others, I try to segregate my tomatoes by size and dry only similarly-sized ones on each cookie sheet. Usually, I'll have one cookie sheet of black cherries, one of the rest of the 'average' sized ones, and one that has only the tiny currant sized ones (they dry really fast and have to come out of the oven much sooner than the others). In a pinch, when the harvest is very heavy, I can put two cookie sheets on each rack if I turn them lengthwise facing the door. I don't really like drying six trays of tomatoes at once, but it can be done. The only really stringent rule I have is that I absolutely, positively cannot eat more than half a batch of dehydrated tomatoes while they are cooling. This can be a very hard rule to enforce. So, if I pick 1,000 bite-sized tomatoes in the garden and eat 500 of them while I'm picking, and then I eat 250 of the dried ones while they're cooling and being transferred to freezer bags for storage....then I'll get 250 dried tomatoes from a picking of 1,000. (And Tim wonders where all those little tomatoes go all summer long! If he'd watch me work, he'd know where they are going.) Actually, I often show a lot of restraint and barely eat any of the dried ones the minute they come out of the oven. You believe that, right?

Seed sources are complicated and so are the reasons a person might choose seed from one company versus seed from another company. Many of the large corporate retailers buy some if not all their seed from exactly the same seed wholesalers, so what you get from one of them is likely the exact same thing you'd get from another of them. (And, in general, those large wholesalers are growing the seeds overseas where costs are substantially lower.) So, for example, under that scenario Seed Company A, Seed Company B and Seed Company C are offering you the same exact seed grown in the same fields under the same conditions and processed the same way. Why, then,do some companies have a better reputation than others for seed germination and for seed growing true-to-type? Because they all have their own ways of shipping, handling, repackaging and storing seed. Perhaps some of those ways are better than others and consumers see it in higher germination rates for example. So, if a consumer has been happy with seed from Company A, they'll keep buying from them. But if the have a negative experience, they may switch to Company B or Company C. With OPs, it is a little different. The more common OPs are available through large wholesalers, but many of the less well-known OPs also are often grown by the smaller companies or by contract growers hired by the smaller companies. If you are a very experienced heirloom tomato grower who knows the orginal seed source for a specific variety offered by a specific company, you may choose to order that variety only from that company because you know the seed came from someone like Craig LeHoullier. For example, both Craig LeHoullier and Carolyn Male have supplied Mike at Victory Seeds with his initial supply of some specific heirloom tomatoes they have been instrumental in saving/sharing. So, if you've grown Cherokee Purple from Victory Seeds, you can feel confident that it is the 'real deal' and not a similar but less impressive variety because you know Mike originally got his seed from Craig and has been keeping that line going. I'm sure Jay can tell you of specific varieties from specific retailers that the tomato afficianado crowd believe is 'the real deal' versus an identically named variety from another retailer that does not seem to be true to type or to produce fruit of the same quality. As with everything else, word gets around. Sometimes when a person is disappointed in a particular variety, someone will ask them about their seed source and may be able to steer them towards a supplier whose seed performs more like one would expect. That's why you'll see someone say something like "I'm only buying this seed from Company X from now on"....because experience has taught them that there is a difference in the seed from Company G and Company X. Some retailers repackage the seeds into their own packets instead of having a wholesaler pack it in their packets prior to shipping. There's a small margin of error in repacking and I think that's where most seed errors occur....when something like Brandywine Sudduth is mixed up with regular Pink Brandywine or something. Only a diehard tomato fanatic might notice the difference, but I guarantee the diehard fanatics WILL notice the difference and will spread the word. Sometimes I have grown Cherokee Purple [and I'm just using it as a example because there does seem to be multiple 'strains' (not true strains) out there--the original and the imposters] from two or more sources side by side and felt like I had two different varieties. The one I choose to go with in the future will be the one that performed most like I know Cherokee Purple should perform. We often see more seed mixups from some of the smaller retailers and I think it is because they are receiving and repacking seed from multiple sources and the more the seeds are handled, the greater the likelihood of human error. Sometimes a young seed company grows too rapidly and expands too quickly and their initial reputation for having pure seed that produces true-to-variey types can suffer accordingly. Sometimes a seed company that growns much of their own seed and contracts out the rest may have a quality issue for a year or two and that really hurts their reputation. I always try to give a company like that another chance because anyone can have an occasional screwup. I don't like to judge specific seed companies on their performance in the distant past because maybe they've fixed whatever was wrong and everything is fine now. However, if I get bad seed from them 2 years in a row, I'm less likely to order from them in the future. It depends, though. If a seed company had a major issue in a given year because their seed warehouse caught fire during shipping season, that's more forgivable than if a seed company seems to have problems every single year. If they have problems every single year, then maybe you lose confidence in them. It also matters if they take complaints seriously. Some seed companies are very diligent about replacing seed that underperforms. Others are more casual about it. I understand both approaches. The companies that are diligent about replacing underperforming or incorrectly labeled seed know that their reputation is stake and most of them go above and beyond to make you happy. However, it also is all too common for people who are new to growing from seed to blame the seed company for their own mistakes, and seed companies know that. Thus, some of them are slower to react to complaints because they know many cases of consumer unhappiness occur because the consumer is a greenhorn who's causing their own problems. I know some people who absolutely will not buy from some sources because of past bad experiences, and I know some who buy exclusively from a couple of sources. I try to spread my consumer dollars around because I like the idea of many companies competing for our business and succeeding. One of the worst things that can happen in the seed business is for consolidation to occur repeatedly leaving the control of the seed supply in the hands of just a few firms. Healthy competition for our seed business is good for all of us. If you watch who we order seed from, you'll see pretty quickly that the same 10 to 20 firms get most of the business from the experienced growers here and that's because, based on past performance, they've earned that business. Dawn

I have grown both sweet 100 and sweet million and while they are generally good varieties, they are nothing to write home to mom about. The most amazing flavor I've ever tasted in a cherry size tomato is Purple Haze which Keith (who posted all the varieties and pics above) developed. This is the only tomato I've ever tasted that I ranked as a 10 on a 0 to 10 scale. Very close runners up are a select strain of Dr. Carolyn Pink and close behind that is Galina. I have several new varieties to grow this year among which at least one should be a new favorite. I am hoping to find a really good red variety. We all have flavor preferences. Some want a strong tomato flavor, others want a very sweet fruit, and others want balanced flavor and sweetness. I am in the last group wanting a tomato that combines a huge flavor profile with a decent amount of sweetness. Some tomatoes are too sweet for me. Sungold is one that can get too sweet. DarJones

A twofer for Ami and Big Daddy True Ami that most of Reinhard's releases he sends to Manfred who offers them off Reinhard's webpage, but there's a few of us, I'm one of them, who have known Reinhard for many years so each year I send him the best of my grow outs and he does the reverse, and sometimes he asks if I can find this or that for him and I've been able to do that as well. But since Reinhard gives the seeds to Herr Hahm there should be no differences in seeds from Herr Hahm as opposed to Reinhard himself. I must ask Reinhard when next I e-mail him if Manfred does any seed production from the seeds that Reinhard gives him, which is something I don't know for a fact. B'c if there is then I don't know as I can say that the two sources would be eqivalent. Big Daddy, since Sungold F1 doesn't split that badly for me , and since I've only grown BSS last year and got no splitting in a rainy year, I don't have a definitive answer. LOL But I have one re Maria and Serena and my feeling is that Maria is still very young and Serena is quite a bit older, so Maria has many years to still win Wimbledon again, and Serna doesn't. I'll be glued to my TV this week watching all the matches, that you can believe. LOL Carolyn