And can I use almost straight compost and aged horse manure?...

charleney, sure but my experience with GZ has been that it is very susceptible to BER. It is a very good tom. Hopefully yours will not get BER.

Reg

i grew my brandywine in a 15 gallon container, the plant itself grew nice and tall - taller than the 6 ft stake i had set up for it, but overall there were a lot of falling blossoms and i ended up with only about a half dozen fruit by the seasons end on it. In a similar set up - Mortgage Lifter fruited much more and didnt have the blossom drop problem. I grew the "lucinda" plant not a green zebra - it's a local hybrid from the Baia Nicchia company here in the Bay Area and they've crossed a green zebra and a silvery fir tree to create determinate bush green zebra types. That plant did excellent in the container and produced about 50 fruit on a smaller 4 ft high determinate bush. My neighbor's green zebra plant grew in the ground fine but he doesn't stake his tomatoes like I do and had a lot of dropped fruit overall.

Both are INDT growth habit plants that tend to grow quite tall. Green Zebras tend to produce abundant foliage which make them top-heavy even before they start producing fruit. They just wouldn't be my choices for pot growing.

I would think you might need to supplement it with calcium with a bit of magnesium i.e. bone meal if you are getting blossom end rot. Manure just doesn't have it. But bone meal is cheap.

I've grown both in 18 gal. containers: GZ does better in nr of fruit, but certainly is BER prone... Just have to keep the watering very even. The Brandy's did not produce near as well as same/same in a raised bed nearby. I'm doing both this year, both in raised beds!

i might be wrong...but the soil mix you're suggesting sounds a little nitrogen rich.

brandywine is very nitrogen sensitive...and it sounds from these posts that the green zebra is as well...so you might end up with big green plants and no fruit.

i would probably keep the alfalfa meal out of there completely...

About Lucinda --

Although it was derived from a cross between Green Zebra and Silvery Fir Tree, we released it only after it was true-breeding (after six generations of selection, and after seeing uniformity in the F6 plants). We fixed most of the Green Zebra fruit traits and most of the Silvery Fir Tree vegetative traits in "Lucinda", although Lucinda is not quite as determinate as Silvery Fir Tree.

If you save seeds from this variety, it will breed true.