I will start by saying that this year is very different from most. Mortgage Lifter normally sets about the same time that other large tomatoes do for me. It makes huge tomatoes, but does not always produce a lot of fruit. Big tomatoes rarely set fruit when the temps are too high, but as the weather cools it will set more fruit. That is why some of us plant both large and small tomato varieties, and also cherries, because it is tough for those big tomatoes to set fruit during the hot part of our summer, but the cherries and small fruited ones fill in the slack spots. My plants are not well marked this year, but I made a chart of where I was planting things, which I need to locate. One of my vines has to be a Mortgage Lifter, because it is one of the stronger plants in the garden, and has the largest tomato in the garden. It is still green, but it is a whopper. Usually the first few fruit from a ML plant will be huge. One year I took a photo of ML on a sandwich and it hung off the bread on all four sides. It is a good tasting tomato as well. The goal each year is to get the tomato plants into the ground early enough to set fruit before the weather gets too hot. For our area this year, it was too much water and too little sun.

On the other hand, my pole beans loved the weather so much that I may have a hard time picking them because they are so thick.

Sorie, I agree with everything Carol said about Mortgage Lifter and the weather too.....and the pole beans too. : )

I planted earlier than most of you because I am so far south, so my Mortgage Lifter tomato plants probably went into the ground in late March. I harvested the first ripe Mortgage Lifter tomato in very late May or very early June. It is a mid-season type, so normally you get the first ripe fruit probably about 80 days after you transplant it into the ground if the weather cooperates. The ML plants' performance can vary quite a bit from year to year depending on temperatures and rainfall and such. Some years if we get too hot too soon after I put ML in the ground, I might not get the first ripe tomato from it until mid- to late-July. One thing about ML that I like, apart from its normally excellent flavor and great size, is that it often continues to set fruit sporadically throughout the summer even when the heat really impacts fruit set on most other varieties. So far, all my ML tomatoes have been bigger than a slice of bread, just as Carol described, likely because we have had almost 49" of rainfall so far this year. Normal annual rainfall for us would be about 38", and generally we would had maybe 18-20" by now in a typical year. While I get large early fruit on ML as long as decent rain is falling, the fruit usually get smaller as time goes on, and they get smaller really fast in a dry year. The ML tomatoes I chopped up last night for the salsa I made and canned today still were huge, so the rain has kept the size of the fruit from falling very much so far.

I've probably harvested at least 15 fruit off each ML plant that I have in the garden so far and there's more green ones left on the plants still, but since they formed and matured during extremely wet weather their flavor has been....not quite as good as usual. Compared to other tomato varieties we're growing this year, their flavor is not watered down nearly as much as some of the others, so they still are good on BLTs or hamburgers, but I've also used some of them while making salsa.

I wouldn't use the performance of any tomato variety this year (or anything other kind of plant) as an example of how it ultimately will perform because this year's weather has been horrible, horrible, horrible from a gardener's viewpoint----although ,as a human being, I'm thrilled for every single person who got wonderful drought relief from the ridiculously high rainfall totals. I never imagined we would have worse flooding down here than during the legendary flood year (also an El Nino year) of 2007, but we have had worse flood, more damaging flooding and lots more damage to bridges, roads, and homes than we did in 2007. A lot of people here already have abandoned their gardens because they were performing so poorly in heavily waterlogged soil. Any tomato plant that survives this weather and produces fruit deserves another chance in another year when, maybe just maybe, we'll have something close to normal rainfall.

Carol, Both my bush beans and pole beans are amazingly happy, and that's after they nearly drowned in May and fought bean rust in May and June. They just keep putting out new growth and setting new beans. I'm not used to getting such good bean production in the kind of heat now, and maybe the heat will slow it down some but it has been the best bean year in ages here.

My asparagus plants are thick and dense like your bean plants and are falling over and blocking the pathways. I keep whacking them back and whacking them back, and I'm not scared that they won't produce next year either---I'm more worried that by continually cutting them back, I'm encouraging them to make even more new growth. I prune them back hard with a long-handle lopping shear because they're so thick and dense that I am afraid snakes may be in there.

There was a 6' long rat snake in the chicken coop eating eggs yesterday. I certainly don't want to find something like that in my garden or, even worse, find a venomous snake in there, so I am really careful where I put my hands and feet since the plants are growing so thickly that you cannot even see the mulch beneath them. It is marvelous to see the garden performing so well in a rainy year, but that doesn't mean I want this kind of rainfall any time again soon.

Dawn

Thanks for your replies ladies. Our other 3 tomato plants are in containers and doing ok. The Celebrity is doing the best.

We've got Market more and muncher cukes they're doing good too. We're just so glad to have tomatoes that taste like tomatoes!!!

Sorie6 - YEA!!!! So happy that 1) Lisa identified the plant and 2) that it's doing so well for you! I have been encouraged. I redid the front area that your plant came from and took 2 other starts myself to 2 other areas. It obviously liked growing there so what the heck, right? I also trimmed the mother plant and with some powdered growth hormone - may have about 8 more "shrubs". Guess what I may share next Spring Fling? LOL!

I didn't grow ML this year but my experience previously is that it's not the first ripe mater. But as Dawn said - it continues to produce even in the heat and stress of Oklahoma summers so hang in there. You may be back here complaining in the fall that you can't keep up with it's harvest (that's what happened with me!).

OT - I showed a work friend your pot set-up for your tomatoes from a previous thread and she was DELIGHTED to see it! She's a new homeowner and a frustrated gardener so she's implemented your pot/watering example!

I'm behind the rest of you....I'm just now going to be planting beans (and okra) this weekend. Wish me luck....

Paula....I'm glad we figured it out! I was so confused that you had pineapple sage that came back year after year! I have been known to kill thousands of plants, but I was pretty sure it wasn't supposed to be perennial here!

Can someone share the pot/watering example, please?