I'm starting to haul in some tomatoes and it's very special. Taste so good !

I have what must be close to a bushel of Romas at this point. I probably pick a dozen everyday. Time to start canning.

Since I plant so early in the year, my garden is almost done producing, which is fine with me because it is too hot to spend much time out there now.

We got great yields from asparagus, potatoes, all the cool-season herbs, bush and pole green beans (planted in late March or earliest April), cabbage and sugar snap peas. The early corn produced high yields, and the mid-season corn (flooded at bottom of garden)produced moderate yields. Onions produced moderate yields but the garlic produced about the same as it does every year. The garlic is in its own raised bed away from the garden and the soil in it drains very well, so it didn't suffer from water-logged soils like the onions did. The lettuce did great until the weather got hot, and the summer squash produced plenty.

It was a great tomato year, although I rarely have what I'd consider to be a bad tomato year. Every variety I planted produced something, except for the Brandywine varieties that were at the lower end of the garden which stayed waterlogged, with water several inches deep standing in it, for a couple of months. Even though they were in a raised bed, the Brandywines still stayed too wet----likely because their raised bed looked like an island standing in the middle of the ocean, so probably it stayed too wet despite being raised.

We harvested our first, earliest tomatoes at the very tail end of April, and our largest harvest was from late May to late June, during which time I canned 200+ pints of tomato products and froze about 20 quarts. I finished up canning around mid-July, not because I ran out of jars, but because I just got tired of doing it. We are still harvesting tomatoes several days a week, but with the heat and dry conditions, they are no longer producing heavily. That's fine with me because I don't really want more than we can eat fresh at this point. Still, some days there's more than we can eat fresh, so I wash the extras and toss them into ziplock bags in the deep freeze. I have enough frozen to make several more batches of salsa.

The fruit harvest was great. We ate all the strawberries and blackberries fresh, and ate all we wanted of the peaches and plums. I canned maybe 100 jars of jelly and jam (I didn't really keep track), with most of it being Peach Jam, Peach Jelly, Plum Jam and Plum Jelly, plus a smaller amount of Blueberry-Lime Jam. The only fresh fruit we are harvesting now is figs.

The peppers got off to a really slow start because of the weather but are producing like gangbusters now. I imagine they will continue to produce heavily until cold weather arrives. The cool-season herbs have mostly burned up in the heat, but the warm-season herbs are doing great.

There's a lot of things I never planted because of the flooding rains, and some of the things I finally got planted then drowned in the third round of flooding---the rain that fell the night Carter County flooded and the toddler was swept away out of his father's arms, which I think was out in Lone Grove. After that third round of flooding, the only thing I planted was watermelons, muskmelons and fall tomato plants. They're all doing fine, and the first icebox melons are now approaching harvest.

It has been almost 4 weeks since we received any meaningful rainfall, so I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude about planting anything else for fall. We have had 1/100th of an inch at least twice in those 4 weeks, but getting your rain at a hundredth of an inch at a time is not very encouraging.

I never got sweet potatoes, pickling cukes, okra, or PEPH peas planted because of the weather, and partly because the back garden wasn't planted this year due to weather and the subsequent weed invasion in the constantly wet soil. I planted slicing cukes early and they didn't do well, drowning after the third round of flooding.

Overall, considering that we had 25.5" of rain in the prime gardening month of May and another 14 or 15" in June, I am pleased with how the garden performed. I would have understood completely if the entire garden had drowned during that time frame and if every plant had died. While the flavor of the earlier tomatoes was watered down by the rainfall, I mostly made them into salsa where their bland flavor was offset/overcome by the stronger flavors of the other ingredients: onions, bell peppers, hot peppers, garlic, cilantro and spices. We didn't really start getting tomatoes with great flavor until July, but we're still getting them and eating them now, so I'm not complaining.

The tomatoes produced really well and continue to produce well, though obviously not as heavily. I have been thrilled with how well the oxhearts did this year. Normally oxhearts don't produce well for me at all because we tend to get too hot too early and they clearly don't care for that sort of early heat. This year the oxhearts produced heavily, their fruit was big and meaty and flavorful, and we still have a few (very few) oxhearts left on plants that now are half-dead from disease. The Dwarf Project's tomato varieties did great, and their PL foliage resisted disease much longer than that of the rest of my tomato plants. They also produced early and produced really well. The tomato plant that best withstood the plague of foliar diseases has been Marion, a Rutgers type that earned its way onto my list for next year by producing heavily and withstanding disease.

Because I carefully spaced out my tomato plantings over a two-month time frame from late March through late May, the harvest has been spread out more widely than usual, which helped keep the canning from getting too overwhelming since I was getting tons of tree fruit at the same time the main tomato harvest was coming in. The plants that went into the ground in May began producing ripe fruit about the time the ones planted in March were slowly down, so it couldn't have worked out any better. I put the last round of spring tomatoes at the west end of the garden where they have morning sun and then dappled shade from the pecan tree, so those plants are still pretty comfortable and have been producing nice yields despite the lack of rainfall and the extreme heat. That's where I put some of my favorite tomatoes---Black Cherry, Ildi, SunGold, Gary O Sena, Indian Stripe, Jaune Flammee, Mortgage Lifter and Lillian's Yellow---so we're still getting fruit from them, and it is tasty.

Amy, Indian Stripe's striping can vary from year to year. Often it is most apparent when they are maturing from the darker green stage to the lighter green stage, and often the stripes almost disappear by the time the tomatoes ripen.

My fall tomato plants, foolish things that they are, are blooming now, but I am not expecting anything but blossom drop in this heat. With lows in the 80s and highs in the 100s, fruit set just isn't going to happen. We'll just have to wait for cooler temperatures to return.

As various vegetable plants finished up and I yanked them out, I planted flowers and herbs, either from seed or from volunteers popping up in the garden, in their place, so still have a garden full of flowers, which means the garden also is full of butterflies, hummingbirds, bees and other pollinators. Since it mostly is too hot to weed, the garden is terribly weedy but I'll catch up on the weeding one of these days when the weather cools down.

I've been happy overall with how the garden has done this year. In May, I really thought we'd lose it all to the flooding, and the fact that we didn't speaks volumes about how important raised beds are during rainy years especially in areas with poorly drained soil.

Dawn

post a picture of your garden setup! That sounds like a lot of space. I'm in a wooded area and I've found that if I keep things planted so they get partial shade they grow all season. Still getting a ton of peppers, tomatoes, my single eggplant plant just woke back up and is producing, I have 6 watermelons on the vine that I can see at the moment, and I planted all the fall stuff last week and it's up and running. Pumpkins and gourds are coming along but no fruit yet.

My indigo Rose has been a BEAUTIFUL plant. It's glorious to watch them turn. But they are very sour and need full sun and a whole lotta patience. Then, they're not all purple because our full sun would destroy them and that means they're only half purple, at best. Now, the plant itself is looking pretty rough and a few are finishing off in a red hue with the purple. I could be wrong about the sun destroying them. I'll need to put them in direct sun and see how they do.

Indigo Rose is very sour. I'd like to grow them again as the purple hue contains important antioxidants. I suppose its small tomatoes can be incorporated into a batch of other tomatoes.

Ace 55 tomato is a tasty "regular" all purpose tomato fruit. And they're very pretty. Production is good. Mine are small - about 2" diameter. The plant is stronger than any other.

I do not find black cherry tomatoes as perfect as the Russian Black Moore. I got annoyed easily about the frequency of harvest. Like Amy, the plant didn't hold up well. It and its fruit were looking pretty bad before I yanked it. I've black moor starts growing in hopes I can get some before winter.

My baker family heirloom plant got massive, but did not set fruit. And only a few flowers, at that.

We may be able to keep our present property. We find out, today. It's not worth putting money into for resale. They want rid of it. We've more reason than most to have it and we're asking a cheap price. If that's the case I'll room for fun next year trying different varieties.

I have learned SO MUCH, because this year I was able to concentrate on simply growing. This year is the first I truly understand the importance and whys of trellising. So great to finally comprehend it fully.

I planted shallow hugelkulture beds below the in ground tomato plants. Never watered. We got much rain, of course. It actually flooded underground in that area. Outside of disease and bugs, they did superb. I am harvesting good tomatoes from sprawling weedy and neglected tomato plants.

I forgot the genovese! Novelty tomato and very pretty. Horrible to peel and, in some cases, hard to eat. Taste is only a notch superior to store-bought tomatoes. Won't grow it again.

I only grow Indigo Rose as a novelty. I feed the tomatoes to the chickens, who sometimes peck at them to get to the water, and sometimes don't.

Juliet and Early Girl are still producing pretty well. I am done with Better Boy and Celebrity forever. Better Boy should be called Worthless Boy because it just doesn't produce squat. About 70%-80% of the Celebrity tomatoes cracked on top.

Dad used to plant Johnny's 361, but Johnny's discontinued it long ago. Next year I am going to try Amelia and Valley Girl. I just can't figure out if Valley Girl is indeterminate or not. Some websites selling the seed says the are, others say they are not.

The Valley Girl that Johnny's sells is the one I consider the "correct" Valley Girl and it is a determinate hybrid that produces red, globe-shaped tomatoes and has a DTM around 60-65 days. It is supposed to be a good heat setter, but I haven't grown it so cannot confirm that from first-hand experience. The people I've known who have grown it seem to like it just fine though.

There are some websites, generally smaller mom-and-pop type companies, that also sell a tomato called Valley Girl that is described as an indeterminate heirloom or OP type that produces pinkish or purplish cherry tomatoes.