Hi Angela,

Welcome to the forum.

First of all, let's address the issue of raised beds. If you happen to be blessed with sandy or sandy loam soil that drains well, you do not necessarily need raised beds. Folks with clay soil or rocky soil often use raised beds to create a well-drained above-grade level bed because it is a necessity with those types of slow-draining soils. So, if you need raised beds, or prefer them for aesthetic reasons, that is fine. I just don't want for you to think they are essential for all types of soil, as they are not.

The type of tomatoes I'd recommend for either containers or a small raised bed area mostly would be determinate, semi-determinate or dwarf types as they are space savers.

With tomatoes grown in containers, except for some of the smallest plants that have been bred for hanging baskets, I'd suggest starting with containers that are at least 10 gallons in size. An experienced gardener can get away with growing some tomato varieties in 5-gallon containers, but it is very labor intensive and can require watering three times a day in our hottest weather and very close attention to soil fertility and supplemental fertilizer. Ten gallon containers or larger are preferable.

So,here's some tomato variety recommendations for containers. Most of the ones on this list produce bite-sized tomatoes but there's a few that produce larger fruit. The advantage of bite-sized fruit is that those plants produce pretty much all summer long unless we get incredibly hot. Since you don't much care for purple tomatoes, I'll avoid listing varieties that produce purple and black fruit (which, along with pink fruit, are my favorite kind). Omitting the black and purple fruit will significantly reduce the size of the list. Otherwise I could go on and on forever listing blacks and purples.

For small (5 gallon or less, including hanging baskets) containers:

Totem
Little Sun (Yellow)
Juliet
Micro Tom
Rambling Red Stripe
Rambling Gold Stripe
Pear Drops
Sweet-N-Neat Red
Sweet-N-Neat Yellow

Especially for hanging baskets:

Terenzo
Lizzano
Tumbling Tom Red
Tumbling Tom Yellow
Tumbling Tom Yellow Jr.
Red Profusion
Yellow Profusion

For any container, but breathtakingly gorgeous when grown in an urn/footed urn type container that shows off its lovely cascading form (and also does great in the ground, but gets too big for the typical hanging basket):

Cherry Falls

Seeds of most, if not all the above, are available from Swallowtail Garden Seeds, which I'll link below, and quite a few of them are available as transplants at Garden Centers and Nurseries in the spring.

For larger containers (10 gallons or more, and prefer 20 gallons or larger):

Early Girl (produces early and then throughout the same as well, often is one of the few varieties setting fruit in August's extreme heat)
Better Bush
Bush Champion
Sioux or Super Sioux
Fantastic
Carmello
Momotaro or Odoriko (pink, sweet fruit)
Bush Goliath
Jaune Flammee'/Flammee' (orange fruit)
Champion 2
Celebrity
Homestead
Persimmon (Orange Fruit)
Better Boy
New Big Dwarf (large, pink fruit)
Dr. Wyche's Yellow (large yellow fruit)
Lemon Boy (smaller than Dr. Wyche's fruit but still fairly large)

For an indeterminate bite-sized tomato from plants grown in the ground. Color of fruit indicated after variety name:

Large Red Cherry (very large red fruit larger than cherry sized)
Sweet Million (smaller fruit than LRC and I'd avoid this if you don't want to endlessly pick the smaller red ones)
SunGold or SunSugar (orange fruit)
Ildi or Galina's (yellow fruit)
Rose Quartz (pink fruit)

For bell peppers, any variety you choose will grow well in containers or in the ground as long as the soil is rich and humusy. A few I particularly like to grow in containers are:

Redskin Pepper (bred for containers and hugely productive)
Roumanian Rainbow (unique because the fruit go from ivory to orange to red and fruit often are present in all 3 colors at the same time, which is very pretty) is bred to be short and compact. It produces early (estimate DTM 60 days) and produces prolifically.

North Star (matures from green to red)
Orange Gourmet (matures from green to orange)

Any of the mini bells will produce tons of small fruit if you are looking for a constant supply of sweet bells. I've grown Yellow Mini Bell and Red Mini Bell.

If you like the little sweet gourmet non-bell peppers sold in mixed bags of yellow, orange and red at the grocery stores, you might want to grow Yummy Orange or Yummy Mix.

For zucchini, any type will grow here, although as the summer goes on you will have to fight squash bugs and likely squash vine borers as well. Planting as early as temperatures allow often enable you to get a plentiful harvest before the pests arrive in hordes.

Some of my favorite varieties are:
Raven
Costata Romanesco
Cavili

A relatively new hybrid bred to be grown in containers is Buckingham Patio. It produces a lovely golden zucchini.

For strawberries, there's not necessarily too many options in the stores, but you usually can find Surecrop, Sequoia or Ozark Beauty. You normally will not get a heavy crop from container strawberries unless you have a whole lot of plants. They do a lot better in long raised beds where you can grow a lot of them. You are likely to get a better crop in our heat from spring bearers than from the everbearers (ones that produce over a longer period (our heat is hard on them).

Hope this helps, and don't be afraid to ask more questions.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Swallowtail Garden Seeds

This post was edited by okiedawn on Thu, Feb 5, 15 at 13:48

I have to quit reading The Enabler's posts. LOL, at least these are container ideas.

Thank you SO much, Dawn!
So many options and I love it! Unfortunately, the back yard is mainly clay. The shaded area near the house (the back faces north) is dark, beautiful soil but everything else is dense clay more than anything else. The front yard is a combination and where I plant most of my flowers. Anything that requires shade has the best soil to grow in but everything else will most likely need to be in a bed or container. A few years ago (maybe 5 or so) I tried a garden in that soil with corn, bell pepper and melons. It was an epic failure. I had two good ears from about 15 plants, the bell peppers had the thinnest walls on them and you could almost see through them and the melons made me cry! They only grew to be little melons (honeydew and watermelon) and just icky. I have to admit that part of it was me in that I was not very knowledgeable but the soil certainly did not help it either, poor things needed better than that. I really should have done my homework.
I am originally from S. Ga where almost anything that you throw out will grow profusely and here, not so much. It takes tender loving care here but in my opinion, that makes everything so much more special.
I love seeing what you all grow and can only imagine huge gardens of lush growing veggies with little chickens and other animals plodding along. Even the smaller gardens bring up visions of happy gardeners and beautiful gardens! :-)

Amy, lol. I'm a really good enabler. Or, maybe it is bad that I'm such an enabler.

Irisheaglesone, Well, I mostly have clay so I do understand the challenges. Still, I didn't start with all raised beds. In fact, I still do not have all raised beds, although I'm getting closer every year to having all of them raised. We just keep plugging away and adding another raised bed or two every year. Sometimes I think we'll never finish.

Do you remember the year you had poor veggie production? If it was 2011, the drought and early onset of heat affected all of us in much the same way.

Have you done the jar soil test yet to determine how much sand and silt is mixed in with your clay? If not, I highly recommend it and will link it below. My clay changes every few feet, so I had to test different areas in separate jars to figure out the areas that needed the most amending in our early years here. We have some truly awful dense red clay, and a nice collection of broken shovels and mattocks from our first years here. However, we also have some lovely clayey-sandy soil that has grown plants surprisingly well with little amending and, in fact, with almost no amending.

I imagine in S. GA, you had better rainfall and nicer humidity levels most of the time than what we'll have here. We moved here from Fort Worth, roughly 80 miles from where we live in OK, and I thought the difference in climate would be minimal. When an old guy who'd lived here since around 1903 or 05 told me our first year here that we'd get hotter than Fort Worth in summer and colder in winter, I thought of his comments as a form of "hazing" the new resident. Nope. He was speaking the truth. That first year here we hit 108-111 in August. Back in Fort Worth, we thought it was out-of-this-world hot if we hit 103-105. The 111 was a huge shock, but at least it showed me what to expect. I didn't expect to be so much hotter (or colder) when moving only 80 miles north, and I was so wrong.

Carol always has said that if a person can garden here successfully, they can garden anywhere.....and I believe that is very true. Even if the temperatures and rainfall cooperates (and they seldom seem to), there's still the flash flooding, the hail (if anyone in the world gets more really large hail than central OK, I don't know who it would be), the thunderstorms and the tornadoes. Hmmm. Maybe we are crazy to think we can overcome all those weather challenges, but we keep trying.

Good luck with your new garden plantings and I hope you'll keep us posted on how it goes.

Remember that you can "sneak" some edible plants into flower beds. Some of my faves for that purpose are dwarf okra plants, Swiss chard in a wild assortment of colors, and many kinds of peppers. Oh, and chives and onion chives too. Onions as well. See, I could go on endlessly.

Rosalind Creasy's brilliant book, "Edible Landscaping", which came out in its revised edition around 2010, totally changed how I think about landscaping and flower beds. I mix in a lot of edible plants in my landscape, but we are in a very rural area with a heavy deer population, so sometimes I think all I'm doing is planting deer chow in the flower beds. I do it anyway.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Jar Soil Test for Texture

irisheaglesone -

I have a small plot on the north side of the cottage that receives, maybe, 2 hours of direct sun a day. In addition, the AC above slowly drips moisture to the bed. That might not be for everyone, but this microclimate grows spinach, chard, lettuce, kale and other cool leafies all. summer. long. without anything from me except occasional weeding and applying mulch after I strip the lambsquarters to feed the rabbits. Stays cool until late August.