Alexis,

I haven't grown Heirloom Orange F-1 or Margo, so cannot comment on them.

I grew Tomande when it first was released and it was okay. It wasn't necessarily anything real special in terms of flavor,but there wasn't anything wrong with it---I just had so many others whose flavor I like better.

If you've ever grown Marmande or Super Marmande, it is sort of like them, but in my garden it produced larger fruit and more of it than they do. In my garden it did set fruit really well in the heat and was fairly disease-tolerant.

The thing with tomatoes is that their flavors can vary from year to year, and even can vary depending on how they are grown. Too much water kills their flavor some years, and some soils grow tomatoes with better flavor than other soils do. To further complicate it, our taste buds are individual and we all perceive flavor in a unique way. Thus, a tomato that my taste buds love might be one that your taste buds hate, and vice versa. That is part of what is so fascinating about growing tomatoes. When you find a variety that your taste buds adore, you're just in hog heaven! Or, at least I am.

So, while all of us can talk about what varieties produce heavy loads of fruit, or tolerate disease, or resist pests, the ultimate judge of flavor will have to come from each person's own taste buds.

I've almost never had a tomato grown under normal conditions that is what is called a "spitter"---one that is so bad that you just want to spit it out. However, I've had some that were so bland that growing them was a waste. However, one person's bland might not be another person's bland. For me, when it comes to flavor, there is almost no such thing as a bad home-grown tomato. It is just that some are more appealing to my taste buds than others.

I think you have a terrific list with a lot of wonderful varieties and I hope you have fun enjoying the different flavors, colors and textures.

Dawn

some day my list will be like y'alls but for now I am only growing 4 varieties from seed and plan to focus my energy on taking really good care of them.
Roma [did really well here]
Amish paste [new to me]
Cherokee purple [ did awesome for me last year]
And some kind of cherry tomatoe that my little man loves
That's it. I am going to try to keep up with 3 of each and maybe 1 or 2 store bought plants. And that's it ......really....
and a porter someone recommended
Kim

This post was edited by luvncannin on Sun, Jan 19, 14 at 8:41

Here is my list from seed. I am giving seed starting a try for the 3rd year in a row and am hoping for better results. So far so good as I think I have my germination methods down!

Porter-Charles Herring
Super Sweet 100
German lunchbox
Campbell's soup #19
Arkansas traveler
Homestead 24
Heidi
Sioux
Flame/Hillbilly
stump o' the world
Gypsy
candy's old yellow
Pineapple
chocolate stripes
dr. wyche's yellow

I thought I was really cutting back this year but nah...

Red Mortgage Lifter
Yellow Mortgage Lifter
Italian Goliath
Djena Lee Golden Girl
Nebraska Wedding
Kelloggs Breakfast
Black Krim
Cherokee Purple
Roma Rio
Heinz1370
Sun Cherry
Snow White
Black Cherry

I've started all but the Purple and Heinz in coffee filters today! Still awaiting 2 seed orders. Also have germination of Packman Broc & Snowball Cauliflower. Dang it, forgot the cabbage seeds. ha!

Paula

I started my seeds yesterday. I am growing;

Early Girl
Black Cherry
Mortgage Lifter
Pruden's Purple
Black Krim

I had a lot of success a couple years ago with Ramapo, but have been unable to find seeds.
James

James,

When I bought Ramapo tomato seed in 2008, I ordered it directly from Rutgers/NJAES. As far as I know, if nothing has changed since then, they produce the seeds themselves and are the only source----unless someone has dehybridized it and is offering a stabilized, OP version of it. (I've bought some dehybridized versions of some hard-to-find hybrid tomatoes in the past from Knapp 's Fresh Veggies online.)

To find the Rutgers order form, just Google Ramapo Tomato Seed Order Form 2014 and Google should find it for you. I cannot find it and link it from my phone, and my computer is sick.....or dead. I think that one year Harris Seed offered it, but maybe I am thinking of Moreton .

Dawn

Where do you order your Momotaro F 1 and if you didn't have it would you pay postage to get it? I ordered some seeds tonight petunias Balcony and Old Fashioned Trailing. Since I had to pay shipping anyway I ordered enough to get about $12 and $4.99 shipping. I did this to try the Balcony petunias. Some things are worth the shipping to me. I already have lots of tomato seeds but I keep hearing about Momotaro. The places with OP seed don't sell it usually.

geez I am behind schedule. I was going to wait until Valentines day to start mine. Im single now so I got nothing better to do that day, LOL.
Funny thing is my new garden is HUGE compared to my old one and Ill probably only plant a couple different types. My seed collection got destroyed by a pack of angry field mice and I dont want to buy a pack just for one or 2 plants. Im not sure i would try a bunch of different ones any how. I guess im boring, LOL.

mike

This post was edited by mksmth on Sun, Feb 2, 14 at 21:41

Homestead 24
Ace 55
Cherokee Purple
Cherokee Green
Cherry Tomato
Small Red Cherry
San Marzano
Black Moor
Flor de Beladre

Helen, I have bought Momotaro a couple of times. The first time I either got it from Tomatofest or Tomato Growers Supply Company. That first seed
packet lasted 4 or 5 years because I don't grow more than 4 or 5 plants of that variety in any given year.

The last time I bought Momotaro , I purchased it and Odoriko from Kitazawa seed because I already was purchasing 6 or 7 other packets of seed from them, including a couple of summer squash (one of which is a Cucurbita moschata) and one of our favorite watermelon varieties, Hime Kasen, which I'm probably misspelling.

Momotaro and Odoriko both produce pink, sweet tomatoes and grow well for me in our normally hot and dry weather. In a rainy year their flavor suffers and they seem prone to disease, but I don't have many rainy years so I grow Momotaro every year. My last rainy year here was 2010.

If you have problems with fusarium wilt in your soil, Momotaro likely should be grown in a container filled with a good soil-less mix.

I like it but I wouldn't order it and pay postage for just that one seed packet, but then I cannot think of anything I like well enough that I'd do that for. It goes against my thrifty nature! Generally, I order enough seeds of various kinds from various places that it is easy to add Momotaro to an existing order.

Dawn

Thanks Dawn. I ordered more seed today - flowers from Wildseed Farms. Three dollars shipping for just a few packets. I pared down my list to keep it cheap. I wanted to get Laura Bush petunias again. I used to have them but somehow lost them. I am trying really hard not to plant tomatoes too early. It is not too early for very tiny flower seed and so I am thinking petunias. I am being stingy about the tomatoes because I have more seeds already than good spots to plant them.

Mike google Wintersown and click on free seeds offers. Go to the tomato list. You can get tomato seeds for the postage. You have to print out the order and follow the instructions. Investigate the Wintersown method. Your winter may be almost over but I have lots more winter. Winter sowing is a mental health thing for me.

edit: Ok I ordered from Kitazawaseed Company. Momotaro, Odoriko, Early Bulam summer squash, Hime Kansen watermelon, Sun Gold, and Summer Dance cucumber. The devil made me do it or was it Okiedawn?

This post was edited by helenh on Tue, Feb 4, 14 at 3:11

I haven't been around here since the end of summer last year but now I'm planning for the spring I wanted to see what everyone is getting ready to plant. So here's my tomato list for this year...

Cherokee Purple
German Lunchbox
San Marzano
Tess's Land Race Currant

Carbon
Black from Tula
Black Cherry
Dr. Carolyn
Orange Icicle
Moskvich
Black Prince
Principe Borghese
Black Plum
Gypsy

The first four I grew last year and all the rest are all new to me. DH and I agreed that black/purple tomatoes are our favorite so that makes up about half of the list.

I need to start figuring out how to fit it all in my backyard. The garden is definitely getting expanded this year. Soon I won't have much grass left.

Cynthia

This post was edited by Cynthiann on Wed, Feb 5, 14 at 16:47

Helen, My husband would tell you that the devil made you order more seeds.....and that I am the seed-ordering devil who enticed you to probably order more seeds than you need. Every time we are in a store that has seeds of any kind, I feel compelled to stop and stand there and look at everything. He used to wait for me, but soon realized I could stand there all day, so he just goes on and gets whatever we're in the store to buy, and calls my cell phone when he's ready to leave and tells me to hurry up and meet him at the checkout if I have any seeds to throw into the cart. He never once says something like "don't you already have more than enough seeds?" and he doesn't sigh or roll his eyes or do anything like that. He has the patience of a saint!

Cynthia,

Who needs lawn grass?

The blacks/purples are our favorites as well, and after I'd grown our first few black and purple varieties in our early years here, I had one year where I planted about 30 of the dark varieties in order to figure out which ones we liked best. As it turned out, we liked them all. Since we had lots of dark-colored tomatoes that year, I gave some away to friends and neighbors, who seemed reluctant to even accept such oddly colored tomatoes. One of them told me his children asked him why I gave him rotten tomatoes, and he had a hard time convincing them that those black tomatoes were supposed to look like that. Now they love them and grow the black types themselves.

Dawn

Dawn, thanks for the information regarding the Ramapo Tomato seeds. Order was placed today.

Dawn,

Now that my boys are teenagers we really don't need the grass anymore. I think we need fresh veggies much more.

I didn't share any of my "strange-colored" tomatoes last year but I definitely could see getting all kinds of reactions from people. I've had conversations with co-workers who were totally shocked to find out there are tomatoes that aren't just red, carrots other than orange, etc. They are always curious about the food I eat anyways because I cook a lot of different ethnic foods. So I'm used to people thinking I have weird/different/strange food.

Cynthia

Helen I followed that tip you suggested for mike and for a small donation I ended up with 20 different kinds of seeds coming!
I really don't know how it happened...must be a seed devil like you said Dawn. I was all set with plans and wham.
So I will be expanding my garden a little and trying to con my ex father in law to grow a few more for me. its happening again, the addiction to seed ordering isn't it?
I even got my AG teacher in on the deal.
on to see who else I can infect.
Kim

The seed I ordered from Kitazawa is already here. That was fast. Too bad it is too early to plant it.

James, I'd glad Google pulled up the link so you could order Ramapo. I was thinking that someone like Harris or Stokes had carried it for a couple of years, but it appears that Rutgers/NJAES is the sole source for it now. Ramapo is one of my favorite red tomatoes, but then......my list of favorite tomato varieties probably would have 150 varieties on it, so I obviously don't plant all my favorites every year.

Kim, I've always enjoyed freaking out my friends by serving them vegetables that are the wrong color. One of my favorites is mashed potatoes made from a blue potato variety. Once they're cooked, mashed, and mixed with milk, butter, etc., they are a lovely shade of lilac. I also like serving potato salad on the 4th of July that is made from red, white, and blue potatoes. I'm silly that way.

Helen, I"m always amazed at how quickly they ship.I hope that they sent you a copy of their catalog with the seeds. If they didn't, I bet they'll mail you one. I really enjoy reading about their varieties. They have a lot of stuff I'd like to try.

Dawn

This is my tomato list for 2014
* 1st time growing

Super Souix (always grow this, as I it always makes)
German Giant
German Lunch Box*
Nebraska Wedding*
Dr. Wyche's Yellow Tomato*
Cherokee Purple Heart Tomato*
Cherokee Purple (my favorite)
Mexico Tomato*
CZECH`S BUSH TOMATO*
GERMAN RED STRAWBERRY TOMATO*
GRANDMA FREIDA`S TOMATO*
SAN MARZANO TOMATO*
OPALKA TOMATO

Bob

Due to my personal situation I ended up moving back home. I'm going to be gardening at my grandparents' home, which is where I will be staying until I can get back on my feet. Gardening with give me an outlet for my frustrations. My list is:

1884
Aker's West Virginia
Absinthe
Arbuznyi
Berkeley Tie-Dye
Berkeley Tie-Dye - Pink
Berkshire Polish Beefsteak
Big Ben
Big Cheef F6
Black and Brown Boar
Black Cherry
Bosque Blue
Captain Lucky
Cherokee Purple
Cherokee Green
Copper River
Cuostralee
Dixie Wine
Dr. Lyle
Porter - Charles Herring
Purple Calabash
Siberian Tiger
Slankards

Y'all have great lists.
Since I was already ordering from my co-op I added a few more types of tomato seeds and I got free seed pkt of beefsteak from one of the seed catalogs. So my original list has more than quadrupled !!! and that's just the tomatoes

Reed I hope the getting back on your feet goes quickly, I think gardening and sunshine will help me and pray it helps you too
kim

I currently have starts for the following---Arlington Texas 8a

Cherokee Purple
Roma (Using up seeds from last year, didn't care for this plant)
Silvery Fur Tree (This plant produced well and was pretty)
SuperSweet 100's
SunGold
Green Zebra
Tomatillos (I know, not tomatoes lol)

I'm pretty new to growing from seed, I have several of these plants at 2-3 inches atm. This will be my first year having a real garden. Last ten years I've been limited to a few containers.

Getting some ideas from your guys lists though!

okiedawn, there is a stabilized Ramapo OP.

According to Tatiana's (click on the "Seed Availability" tab), Knapp's sold it last year but apparently not this year (you could always email and ask them if they have any left over).
http://t.tatianastomatobase.com:88/wiki/Ramapo#tab=General_Info

Trudi_d offered Ramapo OP from WinterSown some years ago; unfortunately it's not on her list at the moment. If folks don't know about her free seed offers: she'll give you several small packets of tomatoes for a SSAE:
http://www.wintersown.org/wseo1/Free_Seeds.html

The hybrid seeds from Rutgers U. are reasonably priced and the postage is only $1.50. Moreton, KC146 and Ramapo are offered for sale. Free is better and I have had good results with Trudi's seeds. I just wanted to make sure I was trying the original type. Some of the Sun Gold OP were not like the hybrid. Actually I liked some of them better but I am not a fan of Sun Gold except that it is a producer for sure.

I am such an intuitive gardener, not a planner. I haven't even made a list yet because...I never make a list. I save seed from OPs, I order seed that looks interesting or if I know I've run out of a favorite, but I don't make a list. What I do is pull out all my seed when I'm ready to plant, hold each packet in my hand and see if I feel like planting it that year. That said, there are a few that are favs and will be on the "list" again this year, and every year.

So for Cherries, this year only three:
Sungold
Black Cherry
Sweet Million

Purchased plants:
Better Boy
Early Girl

Some other favs both for taste and production:
Arkansas Traveler
Thessaloniki

Black Tomatoes:
Cherokee Purple
Black Krim
True Black Brandywine

Paste type:
Big Mama

That leaves room for only 5 or 6 more plants, because I really am cutting back this year. I have perhaps a dozen varieties to give the "intuit" test, but I will only plant 6 of them.

I also have two unknown plants that came up in the greenhouse last fall and are now in a west window in the house. Both have buds, but they are spindly. I will pot them up two or three times before putting them into a tub in the greenhouse and then move them outside...and after all that trouble I will be very disappointed if they turn out to be something from years past that I didn't like.

Dorothy,

I garden intuitively overall, but when it comes to choosing tomato varieties to plant, it is dangerous for me to attempt to do it without a list. I think my gardening intuition goes haywire or it is overriden by the voice in my head that says "You've got the seed....plant them all!" I swear there is a garden demon in my head that tells me no matter how many tomato varieties that I plant, I just need to grow more, more, more.

The very last time I just sat down at my seed box, pulled out packets of seeds and started them in flats without a list, I did plant them all....and I ended up with around 660 plants representing about 175 to 200 varieties planted in the ground. I think that was in either 2005 or 2006. Because there's no way that many plants would fit into the fenced garden I had back then (or even in the larger garden spots now), I planted them everywhere.....along the property's fence line....in the daylily bed and the rose bed....alongside the driveway....in the flower beds by the house, and of course, in the garden proper. The deer found all the plants growing outside a proper garden fence and I learned not to plant more tomato plants than I could protect because otherwise they'd just become Deer Chow.

I haven't had much luck with volunteer tomato plants producing anything I would choose to plant on purpose, but still, I always let a volunteer or two stick around. You never know what you'll get until you're able to harvest and try whatever fruit they produce. I usually get small red ones that are smaller than Early Girl and not as tasty. Sometimes I get small yellow ones similar to Yellow Pear but with even worse flavor. Sometimes I move the volunteers to a corner of the garden where they are out of the way and can serve as a plant for me to move tomato hornworms to when I find them on my "real" tomato plants.

Dawn

Well I got my seeds from wintersown and they blessed me with 19 different varieties of tomatoes. I may have to expand the garden just a bit to accommodate.
I wouldn't want to waste a perfectly good gift! Right?
the additions are...
JT Dorrance
Floidade
Ace 55
Rutgers
ponderosa red
super Sioux
new Yorker
golden jubilee
tigerella
Banana legs
black krim
Cherokee purple
Snow white cherry
Pink sunshine
Texas wild cherry
Romeo roma
Chico III
Porter
Ludmillas red plum
What a variety huh?
Cant wait to get started.
kim

I'm pretty sure this is mine.

Sungold
Principe Borghese
Heidi
Cherry Falls
Speckled Roman
Early Girl
Rutgers (Select?)
JD's Special C-Tex
Blush

Cherry Falls was started a long time ago and is doing great in a pot under lights. Rutgers and JD's are currently sitting in an AeroGarden and need to be potted up. I'm going to start leaving them outside during the day and bringing them in at night to get an early start. The rest will be started tonight.

Leslie

Kim, If you're going to add 19 more plants so you can try one plant of each variety, that's gonna be quite a little bit of expansion. Have fun with all that additional soil prep. (It will, of course, be worth it because you'll get to experiment with a lot of varieties that are new to you.)

Leslie, It sounds like you're off to a great start. I only have one comment to make about leaving the plants outside during the day......watch the wind! Particularly on Thursday, unless the current forecast changes, the wind will be gusting as high as 50 mph and wind that strong can windburn young plants badly enough to kill them. I've been putting my 8 purchased early plants outside every day, but trying to select whichever site each day will give them the best wind protection. We aren't even having incredibly strong wind here--yesterday our strongest gusts were only in the mid-30s.

On a day when the wind is expected to gust up to 50, I generally don't put them outside at all, although I might leave them in the greenhouse on a day like that with the doors and vents open.

Dawn

Dawn I may have to give a few away to friends. my expansion is probably going to be 8x60, but I want to put a couple of other things in there. We will see.
kim

Dawn, yeah I noticed the wind in the forecast. They're still inside and will probably stay there until Friday. I'll put them out a little while after I get home from work Friday and then I'll be home to work on hardening them off over the weekend. I'd rather start Thursday, so I'll see if the wind dies down in the afternoon. The spot I'm going to put the pots is actually pretty protected because of how windy it usually is. I'd rather put these right outside the garage in front of the house, but there's no protection at all there.

Leslie

Here is my list:

Principe Borghese
Brandywine
Matts wild cherry
Prudens purple
Kelloggs breakfast

All of these are new to me. May pick up a plant or two as well.

Kim, That's a lot to expand the garden in one year. We did a big garden expansion last year by putting in a new garden out back of the barn and it almost killed me. We even stayed home from the Spring Fling to finish it and get it planted because we were so horribly behind in getting it done. We worked on it nonstop from Friday through Wednesday of that weekend and finally got it all fenced, ready to plant, and mostly planted. Of course, since our land isn't flat and level and that new garden is sort of on a sloping mesa, with lower land on 3 sides of it, it isn't a nice rectangular shape that makes it easy to measure. I think that when I did measure it and calculate the size, it gave me over 2000 square feet more planting space and a separate new area also created last year gave me over 1,000 s.f. more. I finally feel like I have "enough" space, maybe, to grow everything I want to grow, although the front garden actually keeps shrinking over the years as the trees encroach on it from its north and west sides. I certainly am planting more space now than I have time to weed. There still isn't enough space for all the tomatoes I want to grow, but that's because I want to grow them all.

Leslie, Since I mentioned tomorrow's wind a couple of days ago, the forecast for some parts of OK actually has worsened. We're only expecting gusts around 35 mph here, but the graphics on the NWS website indicate some areas could see gusts up to 64 mph. Can you imagine what winds at that speed would do to tender new tomato foliage?

It could be a bad fire day, so I likely will leave my plants inside all day tomorrow. They are outside now, pouting in the cloudy skies and light winds, but at least the misty-foggy stuff is lifting so they might be a little happier than they were three hours ago. My young tomato plants were on a table beside the garage yesterday all day and were starting to look a little windburned by 1 p.m. so I moved them to a more sheltered location--and it wasn't even all that windy either, so I was surprised to see them looking a little tired and droopy. They did perk up just fine overnight and don't show any damage from the beating they took from yesterday's wind.

Dawn

Sounds like I have the amateur list.
Juliets (if my seed comes in, in time)
Early Girl
Better Boy
San Marzano
Viva Italia
Roma VF
Large Red Cherry
Brandywine
Rutgers

There's not a thing wrong with your list, and it hardly is an amateur list. It take experience growing tomatoes to pick that many good ones.

I've grown every tomato variety on your list and like them all. I still grow some of them every year.

When we lived in Texas, we had a mostly shady yard, and in the very best of years, I still could only squeeze about 12 tomato plants into sunny nooks and crannies. I usually grew only 2 or 3 types per year---a slicer, a cherry type and a paste type. After we moved here and I had endless amounts of space available, I started experimenting with more and more varieties since my sunny space no longer limited me to a very small number of plants.

Every year I try to cut back, but it is hard. There are so many great varieties, and I am a greedy tomato lover. I want to grow and eat them all.

Dawn, I may have been kidding a little bit about the amateur thing. I've been doing this a lot of years. The deal is, about the time a person thinks they have it figured out, nature kicks them in the teeth! Therefore, I am and will always be an amateur. Saves teeth.
I experiment, fail and continually learn from those failures.
Last year my biggest failure and learning experience had to do with potato boxes.
That and turnips. I can not get them to grow in my garden.

A question for Dawn or anyone who has grown Opalaka tomatoes. Dawn, I have read that you grew Opalaka in past years. This year I started some in my greenhouse and they seem to be really vigorous, although somewhat wispy. Since they no longer appear on your grow list, I'm curious why you have stopped growing them. Was it disease problems? Flavor? I haven't seen them or tasted before, so now I'm wondering if I should plant something else for a paste type for canning. San Marzano has been good for me, but disease prone. Thanks for any info.

Irishgal2,

I like Opalka, but it really struggles in our hot, dry summers. I just got to the point where I wanted to grow canning varieties that produce reliably heavy yields every single year, which Opalka did not. It was great in cooler, rainier years, but at my house we rarely have cooler, rainier years any more. It seems like they are more or less a thing of the past. It seems as if every spring/summer tomato season is trying to be hotter, drier and more miserable than the previous one. So, for heavier yields despite the weather, I switched to Heidi. I figured that since it came here to this country from Cameroon, it ought to be able to handle OKlahoma heat and drought. It does. After seeing how well Heidi produces no matter what is going on with the weather here in southern OK, it replaced Opalka, probably for good.

If I could grow only one paste type, it would be Heidi. I adore Speckled Roman too, and Schiavonne Italian Paste.

There's also a constant rotation of new paste varieties on my grow lists because I now dehydrate a lot of tomatoes, in addition to canning them, so I am looking for varieties that make great sun-dried tomatoes. For a long time I used Principe' Borghese for this purpose but after spending endless hours in the garden picking them in ridiculous heat, I want to find larger tomatoes for drying that translate to fewer hours in the garden harvesting tomatoes and more time in the air-conditioned house processing them.

Tess' Land Race Currant (not a paste tomato, but a great example of how aging changes your grow list) is another long time tomato that has fallen off my list, maybe forever. It produced about 3 million tiny tomatoes per plant, but who wants to be out there all day every day harvesting them? Not I. Maybe 5-10 years ago when I was a bit younger and didn't mind the heat so much, it was okay if I spent 3 hours picking all the ripe tomatoes off of Tess' Land Race Currant. Tess and I had a good run together that lasted about a decade, but now I'm over it. : )

With San Marzano, I've grown a bunch of the different ones that have SM in the name, and San Marzano Redorta has better flavor, produces more heavily, I think, and doesn't seem to have as much of an issue with disease. It isn't that there is anything wrong with SM---I just think SMR is better.

Hope this helps,

Dawn

Thank you, Dawn, so much for the info on paste tomatoes. The Heidi sounds like a good one to try, but doubt I can find it already started, so it will have to be next year. Maybe my Opalka will grow off okay, since it is planted within a sprinkler zone. Hope I can get enough to can some salsa at least. If not, we have an abundance of Big Boy and Mortgage Lifter planted. (My first time to grow Mortgage Lifter, also) Disease is always an issue growing within an overhead sprinkler zone, but I'm careful to mulch and keep lower foliage pruned up and we manage to get some pretty good crops. You are truly a blessing to every backyard gardener in Oklahoma. I have followed your posts for a couple of years now, but don't post a lot myself. The San Marzano I grow may be the SM Redorta. My seed likely came from Johnny's or SESE, so I'll have to go back and check records to be sure. I loved the flavor of it, but wanted to try something new. I may order seed of your favorites Speckled Roman and Schiavonne Italian Paste for next year also. Again, thank you so very much for your timely response, and happy growing!

Irishgal, You're welcome and thank you for your kind words.

Now that you have posted and spoken with us, I hope you'll post more often and keep us up-to-date on how Opalka is doing for you. I just came to suspect, over a period of years, that it liked the cool summers better. I don't know about you, but I find we don't have an occasional cool summer any more like we once did. I'd love to have a year like 2002, 2004 or 2007 again, minus the 2007 flooding.

You'll never hear me say a bad word about San Marzano Redorta (or really about any of the San Marzano types), and the best ones I ever grew were from Franchi-Sementi Seed imported from Italy and sold by Seeds From Italy. I know that San Marzano seed should be the same no matter the retail source, but the Franchi-Sementi seed gave me plants that just produced like mad. Now that I mentioned Seeds From Italy, I'll have to link them, right? (grin) They put a ridiculous number of seeds in a packet. I think they say 125, but mine almost always contain way more than that. My other favorite tomato seed suppliers include Gleckler's, Sample Seed Shop and Victory Seeds.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Seeds From Italy

I really do appreciate the link. I'm an adventurous sort and would love to have seed directly from Italy. It's great to go straight to the source. I'm sure I'll grow San Marzano again, but with fresh seed and better disease control. I got the Opalka started early and they're good sized now and thriving, so maybe I'll get an early fruit set with them and all will be well if I can keep them supplied with enough water and shade. Their description sounds wonderful, "dark red and very sweet." It really enticed me. I don't even remember what "cooler summer" means anymore. I'm in eastern OK county and we've certainly had enough weather issues in recent times, not to even mention the earthquakes! Thank you again for the help.

I've corrected my zone to 7. Don't know why it previously showed 10. I'm still learning my way around the site.

This post was edited by Irishgal2 on Tue, May 13, 14 at 16:56

okiedawn,

I'm wondering if you have an update on your texwine success this year?

Bob

Hi Bob,

I'll preface my comments by stating we were in drought throughout the spring and summer with very little rainfall at all until June, and even then, there was far too little. So, while our growing conditions here in Oklahoma are always pretty harsh, this year was worse than usual because it was backwards. Instead of having good spring rainfall to get the garden off to an early start and then the usual summer drought, we had drought from Jan-Sept (and the drought still is going strong), and began June with only about 6" of rainfall recorded for the entire year at that point. We got a lot of rain and humidity in June and July, though not nearly enough rain to end the drought. With the weather being so bizarrely dry during our normal wet season, some tomato plants weren't very happy.

TexWine (and Dixiewine, and it was my first year with both) germinated a little slowly and grew, as seedlings, very slowly. Because of that, I kept the seedlings in their starter containers longer than all the other varieties I grew, and didn't put them into the ground until late April. Most of the other varieties went into the ground between late March and mid-April. Even then, the Dixiewine and Texwine plants were ridiculously small and were so far behind my other plants that I feared transplanting them into the garden was going to be a waste of time and space.

How did it work out? Texwine set fruit earlier than Dixiewine, and set a lot more of it. The first few were quite large, and the later ones got progressively smaller as summer went on, which is typical in our hot growing conditions. Because we had several good days with decent rainfall and cooler than normal temperatures in both June and July, Texwine (and Dixiewine) continued setting fruit well into July. The Texwine fruit had very good flavor. So did Dixiewine, which may have hurt its own cause by setting tons and tons of fruit all at once. Because it had set so very many fruit during a period of severe to extreme drought, the fruit stayed much smaller than I expected. TexWine had significantly fewer fruit but they enlarged to the expected size. Even though Texwine produced less fruit per plant than Dixiewine, it still produced a lot of fruit.

I hate to even attempt to form an opinion on varieties that are new to me on the basis of one very odd growing season with weather that is almost totally opposite from what we usually get, but I was pleased enough with how they both performed that I'll plant them again next year.

Drought conditions worsened again in August in conjunction with very hot weather at our house, and both plants died back to the ground. I didn't irrigate as much as I usually do in August and probably could have kept them alive if only I'd watered them. A little rain (though not nearly enough) began falling again in September, and both plants have resprouted from the ground but the chances that they'll flower and produce a ripe tomato before the first freeze here (around mid-November) falls somewhere between slim and none. I do think it says something about their resilience that they did regrow from the roots once some rain finally fell.

Are you wondering if the flavor is a good as Brandywine? I'd say that, as grown here in the conditions we had, it isn't quite as good, but it is very, very good.

Finally, to give you the proper context, I planted two Brandywine Sudduth plants in the ground around the end of March. Normally, I am lucky 4 years out of 5 to get 6 fruit off a Brandywine plant. We just get too hot too early for it most years and the heat and humidity shut down pollination before many fruit can set. In this most bizarre year of years, both my Brandywine Sudduth plants produced dozens and dozens of fruit per plant, with the first ones ripening very early (either very late May or earliest June). They also continued setting fruit as late as mid-July, though production slowed down a lot by early July. This was our best Brandywine year since 2004 (a very wet and humid year that the Brandywine plants loved, likely because the weather also was cooler than usual).

I wish I'd had the Texwine and Dixiewine plants at the same size as the Brandywine Sudduth plants and could have put them all in the ground, side by side, at the same time, because that would have been a more fair comparison. My expectations (prior to sowing seed) were that Texwine and Dixiewine likely would outproduce Brandywine (in my garden everything outproduces Brandywine most years) and, instead, the total opposite happened.

I don't know if their slow growth as seedlings will be repeated in 2015. I'm hoping it was just a fluke. I grow hundreds of tomato plants from seed every year, and there's not many varieties that ever have been as slow to grow in the seedling stage as Dixiewine and Texwine so I am hoping that this year's extremely slow growth was an anomaly.

We had an incredible tomato year here despite terrible drought conditions, and a huge onslaught of grasshoppers, so I cannot complain. Mostly, this was due to the miracle of irrigation. Local gardeners here in our area tended to have either a very bad tomato year (if they were not irrigating in March through May when the rain was almost nonexistent) or an outstanding year (if they irrigated in spring)

I'm hoping for more typical weather conditions next year so I can see how Texwine and Dixiewine perform in the type of weather we normally have.

Dawn

Dawn, Wow! Thanks for the information. I was thinking of trying Texwine or Dixiewine next year in my Round Rock, TX garden...your experience gives me pause. I have not had much success with Brandywine varieties setting fruit in Texas (although they are delicious).

Did you get your seed from Marianna's?

I am surprised that your growing difficulty was as a seedling. I wonder if that is typical for that cultivar? From what I understand Texwine was segregated for its productivity in Elgin, TX, but I don't know anything about special requirements for plant growth. Perhaps it requires more nutrients to prevent delayed growth?

Anyhow, I'll probably still try out Texwine for myself. I am going to compare with Brandywine from Croatia (not a true Brandywine) to see if either can give me the kind of productivity that I'm looking for out of a Brandywine-esque tomato.

Hopefully I can find a trade with someone for seed that had good luck with Texwine.

Thanks again for the info!

Bob,

You're welcome.

I grew Brandywine in Texas (Fort Worth) and had the same luck with it here that I had there---its productivity hinges entirely on the weather. If I can plant it early enough, and if the spring weather doesn't get too hot too early for fruitset to occur, it can be really productive....but I only have conditions like that about 2 years out of 10. I love, love, love Brandywine and could be pretty content growing only that one variety if it produced reliably. Every single person I've ever given a fresh Brandywine tomato has had the same response "This is the best tomato I've ever eaten?" and then they want to know why I haven't given them Brandywines before. Non-gardeners tend to not understand why a variety like Brandywine won't produce as well as any other tomato in our climate, but we gardeners understand the issue all too well. I only have enough Brandywines to share them 1 year out of 5, and then everyone is mad they don't get them every year.

Yes, I got the seed from Marianna's. I've grown a lot of her varieties in recent years and really like them.

I've grown hundreds of tomato plants indoors under lights every year for the last 16-18 years. Every now and then there will be an oddball variety that just doesn't sprout and grow well indoors that year. I expect it is just a fluke when it happens---maybe some weaker seeds of that variety that year or something that were slow to germinate. Very seldom will the same variety ever have that problem again, so I imagine it was just an oddball occurrence this year with Texwine and Dixiewine and probably won't happen againzI doubt it is a problem with the varieties themselves. What tends to happen to any tomato variety that is slow to germinate is that it ends up being shaded by taller seedlings in the flats and that means it grows slowly until I notice it is being shaded and move it out of the regular flat to a flat of its own so taller plants aren't shading whatever varieties are slow starters. I grow many kinds of veggie, herb and flower seedlings indoors every year, moving them out to the unheated greenhouse once the nights are warm enough, and any plants that are slow tend to get lost in the crowd. Next year I'll watch Dixiewine and Texwine carefully to see if they have any trouble germinating or growing. I don't expect that they will.

The best Brandywine I've ever grown is Brandywine Sudduth, but I also have been very happy with True Black Brandywine (the one saved by William Woys Weavers' grandfather and which some heirloom tomato afficianados do not consider a true Brandywine), which I grew from seed purchased from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds about 5-7 years ago. I haven't grown TBB lately because I have become obsessed with growing JD's Special C-Tex and Gary O Sena most years instead. I like Keith Mueller's other crosses too, like Dora and Liz Birt, though I haven't grown them the last couple of years.

If I have trouble with the Texwine or Dixiewine seed in 2015, I'll likely order another packet of each so I can figure out if it is a problem with those varieties (and I bet it is not) or if it was just a bad year or a batch of weak seedlings. I've grown close to 1000 different varieties of tomatoes from seed, and I can only think of 3 or 4 varieties that just absolutely, positively would not grow well for me year after year after year, either as seedlings or as plants in the ground after they finally got big enough to grow in the ground. I could drive myself crazy wondering why, but with those varieties I also purchased transplants from a store and those didn't do well in my garden either. I think it is just fate or something, but I gave up on those few and concentrated more on plants that were happy to grow and produce here.

My latest obsession has been the search for heart types that produce well in our heat. I tried several in the early 2000s, in which we mostly had one drought year stacked on top of another, and none of them did well here. A few years back, though, I tried Brad's Black Heart in a year when the hot temperatures that shut down pollination arrived in early May and most of my tomato plants set relatively few tomatoes after the heat set in. That was in the terrible drought year of 2011. Brad's Black Heart outperformed everything that year, which I thought was interesting since hearts usually don't set fruit well in hot years. So, I've grown Brad's Black Heart pretty much every year since then and it continues to grow well here. I'd like to find a few more hearts that will produce in heat, so will try maybe 5 or 6 oxheart varieties next year.

I keep trying to make my grow list shorter instead of longer, but there are so many different varieties to try that I expect I'll keep growing a few new ones every year.

Dawn

Dawn,

You have a wealth of information.

Have you heard of Joe's Pink Oxheart? I've heard good things from people who are in warmer climates.

Bob

Bob,

I'm old....so over those decades, hopefully a person learns a few things. (grin) Notice I said old, not older or oldest.......(giggling hysterically here). I try to pass on those things I learn. Nowadays, with the internet, new gardeners can research and read obsessively and learn as much in one year as I learned in my first 40 or 45 years the hard way....by doing things and having them either succeed or fail and then trying to learn why. The learning curve is so much shorter now, and I think that's a wonderful thing.

Thanks for the tip on Joe's Pink Oxheart. I'll have to research it and see what I can find out.

I love living in zone 7 although I found gardening easier in Zone 8a. You're so far south in zone 8b that it boggles my mind to try to imagine how hard it must be to get tomatoes to grow and produce before the heat down there makes it impossible.

My hardest adjustment to living in zone 7b (I live about 85 miles north of where I grew up and gardened in Fort Worth for my whole life until we moved here in 1999) is that I still feel fairly close geographically to the Fort Worth-Dallas metroplex, so I tend to try to plant just as early here as I did there, and most years that's not a good idea because the nights stay freezing cold much later in the spring here than they did in Fort Worth. When my family and friends who are gardeners start planting down in Fort Worth, my brain urges me to go right ahead and plant at the same time, even though I know I probably shouldn't. I still read Texas Gardener magazine, but have to mentally reel myself in when they are discussing what to be doing in the garden "this month" in any given issue because, realistically, I won't be doing it up here for another month or so since we warm up later.

Dawn

Dawn,

You might want to periodically check out Carolyn's Fall Feedback Reports on the TV forum. Apparently, she offered Dixiewine. At least one other person had trouble getting the plant started, although based on their feedback it is not exactly clear why.

Bob

Thanks. Will do.