I LOVE Cherokee Purple. The closest I have found to it (and I have not got that much experience) was Cherokee Stripe (not any prettier and probably decended from CP). But the surprise for me was called Grandma Susie's beefsteak. Also not pretty but mine have been wonderful. This is a red tomato. I got seeds from Duck Creek. Try Arkansas Traveler for your wife. Pretty, pink and rarely flawed.

AmyinOwasso,

Thanks for information about Grandma Susie's tomato. I already grow the Traveler's and Bradley tomato's, the Traveler comes from Bradley. They are good tasting tomatoes. My daughter grew the Cherokee the last couple of years and raved about how good they were so I thought I would try them, she was right. I have found that the Travelers will keep producing even in the hottest weather.

I like the taste of all black tomatoes that I have tried, but in my garden Black Krim produces more tomatoes than CP. CP tends to be a larger tomato, but just doesn't make a big crop for me. BK just keeps on giving.

soonergrandmom,

The CP were kind of slow to start but they produced more later in the season. There have been all we could eat fresh. I don't know how they would can though as I haven't tried they yet.

Cherokee Purple/Arkansas Traveler,

It has been some time ago that I read a post some where that someone had crossed the CP & Arkansas Traveler. It may be several years ago now.

I've heard nothing but raves for the taste of Black Krim. I should try it.

I have something growing that I think is black krim. It had no label. The labeled plant never produced fruit. (It was a replacement for something that didn't survive the rains and not in great shape when planted.). If what I have is black krim, it is not sweet enough for me. Could just be this plant, I'm going to try it again next year to see. Maybe I should get different seeds.

Porter Tomato's,

Porter Tomato's are small like Cherry Tomato's and they can stand dry weather and have a very good taste. They come in 2 verities Porter & Improved Porter. The improved Porter are pear shaped and the original Porter are round. I have had very good production from both kind. They are more of a pink tomato.

I'm pretty picky about my seed sources. If I get tomato seeds that are not true to type from a company, it is very unlikely to get my business in the future. When I order Black Krim seeds, for example, I expect to get seeds that produce the actual Black Krim, not something that is kinda, sorta like Black Krim is supposed to be. For heirloom tomato seeds in particular, I trust Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Seed Savers Exchange, Victory Seeds, Johnny's Selected Seed and Tomato Grower's Supply Company....and not very many others. I really like the smaller retailers who maintain strong control over the production of their seeds.

When it comes to the big seed companies, most of them get their seed from the same exact wholesalers and the seed is not even grown here in the USA, so if there is crossed seed out there due to a problem incurred in the production of the seed, they all have crossed seed the same year and they don't know why it happened because they aren't raising the seeds themselves. I think with seed companies, much of the time, smaller is better.

My dad always grew Porter. Fred still grows Porter here just up the road from me. Some years I grow Porter transplants just for him. I have grown Porter many times and used to get my seeds directly from the Gene Porter & Sons Seed Company back when it was in business, but I rarely grow it any more in my own garden. When it was the only pink tomato I grew in the 1970s and 1980s, I thought it was wonderful. Now that I have found so many other pinks that my taste buds like much better, I just don't bother with it any more. I prefer big pinks, and mostly it all gets back to how much time I have to spend in the garden harvesting. When you average 100 tomato plants per season, the larger the fruit each plant produces, the faster you can finish harvesting and get back indoors out of the heat. There's not much else, though, that will outproduce Porter in the August heat, and that's why people I know still grow it. By August, I've usually overdosed on tomatoes and don't care if any are producing at that point or not.

I think that 2012 broke me of the habit of planting too many tomato plants that produce smallish tomatoes. I sometimes harvested tomatoes for 8 solid hours outside in dreadful heat, and then came inside and canned for a few hours more. Since then, I've cut back on the varieties that produce a lot of little tomatoes--that is why Principe' Borghese, Tess' Land Race Currant, Black Plum, Heidi and Porter, to name a few, rarely make it only my grow lists any more. I am trying to grow varieties that produce larger (but still tasty) fruit so I can spend less time in the garden harvesting. There's never enough hours in the summer as it is, and I like to get back indoors before the sun gets too high in the sky. In 2012, my son was continually coming out to the garden and dragging me indoors to cool off, and he was right. I was spending too much time out in the heat that year. I'm trying to find more efficient ways to get the harvest I want without half-killing myself to get it.

Okiedawn,

I use the small tomato's for fresh eating & and in salad, I tried canning cherry tomatoes one year but never again. I can Traveler & Bradley tomato's just for juice, I find it easiest and less trouble. We make a lot of vegetable soup & chili during the winter. To me they have a sweet taste. I only have a small garden for home use and I give away any extra to friends. I can't imagine how anyone could take care of 100 tomato vines plus all the other garden you grow. I have been growing just 25 tomato plants for the past several years but plan to cut back to maybe 12/14 next year. I grew about 100 tomato plants a few years ago but will not try that again. When it becomes to much work it isn't fun any more, and you start to dread it. At least that has been my experience. I have ordered seed from Wilhite & Southern Exposure and had no problem with the seeds. (Try and not over do it because I can tell you from experience that heat stroke is not any fun. Three for me.)

I agree with your decision not to can cherry tomatoes. That's too much work.

I'm cutting back on tomato plants next year, because Tim's new work group is about 100 people less than his previous one, and that means I'll be making a whole lot less salsa to give away. Yay. When he retires one of these days, I'll cut back even more on how many tomatoes I grow.

In my worst/best year, when I was trying as many heirloom tomato varieties as I could in order to find the ones (quickly!) that we would like best, I had 600 tomato plants. Luckily/Unluckily about half of them were outside the fenced garden and mostly served as Deer Chow. Still, I gave away Wal-mart bags full of tomatoes daily, including to perfect strangers who stopped by just to say "I love your garden". My reply? "Really? Why, thank you, here....have a bag of tomatoes." lol. The next year I cut back to 300, then to 150 the year after that. Since then, most years, I grow from 100 to 150, with my object being to get tons of tomatoes all at once, get my canning done, and then yank out all but my favorite tomato plants to use for fresh eating. Even though the planting, maintenance and harvesting of that many plants is burdensome, it allows me to can several hundred jars of various tomato products over maybe a 4-6 week period, and then I can call it quits on tomato canning, and move on to peppers, cucumbers, etc. The hardest part is when the plums and peaches all are ripe at the exact same time that the tomatoes are ripe. It leads to massive canning overload. I kinda love it and kinda hate it all at the same time.

I got heat exhaustion at least 3 times in 2011 while at wildfires serving drinks and food to firefighters (ironically) so that they would not get heat stroke or heat exhaustion. Each time I was getting sick from the heat at the fires, I pulled myself out of the situation and got into an air conditioned fire vehicle with a bottle of Gatorade or water and stayed there until I had sufficiently cooled down and rehydrated. I wasn't the only one that summer as we had brutal fires in brutal temperatures. We even had a young firefighter suffer a mild heart attack, and several others had to have attention from Medics, although I don't remember that many of them actually had to be hospitalized. Since then, I have had to pace myself very, very carefully when outdoors in the summer. It is like the summer of 2011 ruined my body's ability to tolerate high temperatures. I am very careful now, and both Tim and Chris watch me like a hawk when I'm out working in the heat. One of the best strategies I have found is simply to cut back on tomato varieties that produce small tomatoes that take a ton of time to harvest. It really has reduced how long I spend picking tomatoes, but I do miss some of the small-fruited varieties I used to grow.

We are having BLTs for dinner tonight. Yum. It is sort of how we start out the tomato season, savoring every bite of the first few tomatoes on our favorite sandwiches, and now it is how we are enjoying the tail end of the tomato season. I have enough tomatoes on the counter for us to have BLTs several times this week. I don't overdose on bacon in general, but if there's anything worth eating something as fattening as bacon, it is BLTs, especially when the tomato season is drawing to a close and you know that it is a long, long time until next year's harvest begins. Sometimes I behave and make the BLTs with turkey bacon, but you know, they just aren't as good.

Oh, and I did overdose on canning in 2014. I just canned so much for so long that I did start to dread it. So, this year, I cut back. I didn't grow cucumbers and I also didn't can many peppers. It made for a much easier canning year, but then, I do have to worry now that we'll run out of pickles and pickled peppers (from 2014's canning) before next year's harvest begins and we'll have to buy them. Oh, the horror and shame of a gardener/canner having to buy commercially canned pickles and peppers! (grin) On the upside, we have tons and tons of jelly and salsa canned, and I did it without totally taking all the fun out of food preservation. I was so burnt out after 2014 that I considered declaring 2015 a non-canning year and not doing any canning, but then I decided that I'd be sorry if I didn't do some canning. I have trouble doing things in moderatio, as you likely already know. I also figure that if 50 jars of plum jelly is good, then 100 jars is twice as good.

My 2016 Tomato Grow List is going to be shockingly short, I hope.

Um, excuse me - Tomato Queen - but if your 2016 list is "shockingly short", I'm going to become a "prepper".....because surely Pergatory is about to freeze over.

lol! You know I luv ya!

Oh Paula, I am getting so burned out on how hard I work getting all the harvesting and canning done in the summer months. I literally do nothing in June and July but harvest and can, harvest and can, harvest and can. Well, I also dehydrate and freeze, and cure potatoes and onions and put them in root cellar storage, but none of those other preservation just totally fill up every minute of my day like the tomatoes do. I hardly even sleep. It is sucking all the life and enthusiasm for both gardening and canning right out of me. Truly, it is. So, after spending all of last winter contemplating giving up gardening/canning for the whole year of 2015 (which would have been totally refreshing in one way, but would have driven me nuts in another way and clearly I decided against taking a sabbatical from both), I promised myself that I'd find a way to have a more balanced garden and life. Cutting back on how many tomatoes I grow and then, subsequently, must preserve (above and beyond what we eat fresh) is the quickest path to having a more balanced life and garden. Still, I thought of all the people (over 240 of them) to whom we give gfits of salsa, canned peppers, jelly and pickles every Christmas and asked myself....how do you cut anyone off the list? It is an impossible dilemma.

Fate threw me a life preserver a few months ago when Tim made a career move at work, leaving the huge Patrol/Rescue division at his department to go to the smaller Special Operations (SWAT, Snipers and such) Division. Since a huge number of the people on his Christmas list were the folks in his old division, I now can trim the Christmas list significantly, which means in future years I can make a whole lot less salsa and stuff. That opens the door for me to cut back a huge amount on how many tomatoes I grow.

There might have been a time when the thought of cutting back on how many tomatoes I grow would have left me uneasy, but it no longer does. I look forward to having space for more herbs and flowers, more fruits and non-tomato veggies. I still love tomatoes and always will, but I'm ready to grow and can fewer of them in order to make more space for other things.

I'm also dealing with a gigantic woodland that is encroaching on my front garden from the north and west, eating up real estate where I used to grow tomatoes. As you can imagine, the trees surrounding my garden are a lot bigger now than they were when we built the garden in 1999, and I knew the day would come when we'd have to make changes to the garden because of the looming presence of the woodland. I hope to do some work to the front garden this spring, moving in the fencelines and making it significantly smaller. I envision a longer but much narrower garden, conceding now too--shady space to the trees, their roots and the shade they cast. . It is either that, or cut down trees that tower at least 60' above my garden. I cannot even imagine sacrificing big, beautiful trees like that---not to mention that it would be really hard to remove them without having them fall on the garden anyway and smash all the fences and raised beds.

I believe our gardens are meant to evolve with us and to change as our needs change. Well, my need to grow way too many tomatoes is evolving, and my garden is going to evolve with it. There was a time when I likely would have dreaded making these changes, but I'm actually excited about them. I've been stuck in an endless rut of growing too many tomatoes and then having to deal wih the massive harvest for far too long. Enough is enough. I'm using Tim's new career position, and his need for at least 100-125 fewer Christmas gift bags of garden goodies, as a catalyst for change. Is there a little bit of me that is worried that all his former co-workers in Patrol/Rescue still expect Santa Tim to come into work in December bearing bags of garden goodies? Well, of course I am, but I think that in their hearts they must know that things have changed and that their Santa Tim is now a different division's Santa Tim.

My friend, Joyce, tells me all the time "you work too hard", and she is referring to the gardening and canning carousel that occupies my every waking moment in summer. She's right, you know, and I have been trying to find ways for some time to work smarter, not harder. Cutting back the tomato list is just the beginning of that evolution.

I hope all you folks here can handle the disappointment of short little tomato grow lists (grin), because that's what you're going to see from me. I have spent most of the last 2 decades growing an amazing diversity of tomatoes, always looking for the absolute best ones that would meet our needs. Well, I've grown them, I've found the best ones for us, and now I'm going to focus more on quality and less on quantity!

Dawn

Okiedawn - Gary'O Sena?

Where can I get some seed of GaryO' Sena? I read that it is a Brandy Wine/ Cherokee Purple cross. I have never had any luck with Brandy Wine tomato's either no production or what few fruit that made were so freakie shaped they can't really get a good taste test.

Thanks for all your information.

Last year Gary had it at Duck Creek Farms, which I'll link below. For anyone not familiar with Duck Creek Farms, it is based in northeastern OK and Gary occasionally posts here on this forum, when he has time (which means, generally, not during the growing season when he is very busy). And, Duck Creek Farms is an awesome source for heirloom sweet potato slips as well.

Duck Creek Farms' Tomato Seed Page

Seed of Gary O'Sena also usually is available from Glenn Drowns at Sandhill Preservation Center, although you never know what they'll have until they update their seed list, which normally is after the first of the new year, since they raise their own or have US-based contract seed growers, so their offerings can vary each year depending on crop failures.

Another source, operated by another member of Garden Web, is Sample Seeds. Remy has it on her current page of tomato listings but a note says "Coming November 15", so it isn't available at the moment.

The packet of seed I've been using for several years is from Gleckler's Seedmen, but they've gone out of business (for a second time) since I bought my packet, so I'm just relieved to see a few other places now offer the seed.

Hi all. I have been so far out of the loop I was in withdrawal.

I think it's awesome how everyone has such different tastes when it come to tomatoes. Me I don't eat any of them. But for fun I like growing Texas wild cherry, Sungold cherry,thank you Dawn I got my ex boss hooked on those, porter, pink sunshine, Amish paste. All summer and still am picking I have been freezing and giving. When I get a minute from home repairs I will make ketchup for littleman.

I also have to say it's such a good feeling to pass the addiction... I mean love to others. My ex boss couldn't say enough about the different varieties I gifted him this spring. He said if he was only allowed to grow one it would be Cherokee purple

Has anyone ever grown JD's Special Texas C ?

Well, Ms Dawn,

I am happy u onare cutting down, because i felt grossly inadequate not having your energy!!! So, when will you post your new "i will only grow these" tomatoe list? I trust your most thorough research to the point i plant 2 weeks after u, and am addicted (really) to your list. I am so exited!

Okiedawn,

How do Gary O' Sena and Indian Stripe taste after they are canned? Do they make a dark juice?

Authur, I love JD's Special C-Tex and grow it pretty much every year. It is remarkably early in my garden, so ignore whatever DTM they have listed with it (usually 75-80 days depending on the seed source and location of whoever is growing it) because the DTM is an estimate and likely is wrong. In my garden it produces huge tomatoes with amazing flavor and lots of them, and the first one to ripen is usually about 65 days from transplant date, and aybe even earlier in a year when the cold nights end pretty early in spring. Their juice is darker than that of a regular tomato but, if you mix many tomato varieties together in a canning batch like I do, you won't really notice it. Now, if you can a batch of nothing but dark tomatoes, you will have a juice or a canned product that is more of a dark red or maroon than a typical tomato red. The tomatoes taste fine after canned, but I almost always have a mix of all the tomato varieties I grow in each batch, depending on what is ripe at the time, so the flavor I get is a blend of everything. I love that because it gives you a very well-balanced yet finely nuanced flavor---like a fine wine! About the only time I'm cooked or canned anything with only one flavor was when I was making an orange pasta sauce of nothing but SunGold tomatoes.

Kim, I think with our first garden here I had maybe 3 or 4 tomato plants. That was before we even built the house and I had a barbed wire fence around it when kept out the cows and the deer, but not the possums and coons. I haven't had a small tomato garden since that year. The second year it was likely 35-50 plants and the third year, maybe 100-150. I've been totally out of control (well, when it comes to tomatoes) ever since.

I'm looking forward to growing fewer tomatoes and more of everything else. It is time, and Tim's job change to a smaller division just made it possible for me to make some gardening/canning changes I've wanted to make for a few years now.

I hope to have the new list up in a few days. I'm working on it. I got the tomato seeds out of the seed crate and looked through them all yesterday and started to try to formulate a plan. How many varieties? 10? 20? How many plants? 35? 45? 50? I practically had a panic attack trying to figure out how to whittle down the huge variety of available seeds to plant only the best/most desirable in 2016. I think once the list is made, I can stick with it pretty well. Or, I hope I can.

I'm glad you're spreading the joy of growing tomatoes----the addiction to growing as many kinds of tomatoes as possible needs to be shared. If there is one time it is good to be an enabler, it is when you are getting folks addicted to growing more, more, more and more tomatoes. I'm cutting back not because I don't love tomatoes, but just that I've over-loved them for the last decade and need a break from being knee-deep in ripe tomatoes all summer.

Dawn

How does the taste of and production of J.D.'s Special C - Tex compare with GaryO' Sena, Indian Stripe & Cherokee Purple?

I heard myself say to someone Ya'll still have tomatoes? They did. They did, indeed, have plenty of tomatoes from my last donation. I slipped my jacket on, tonight, to go out and pull the pepper plants and found two tomatoes in its pocket from the last harvest.

Next year I want to focus on 10 plants of each type so I can go to market. I don't want to have 50 different kinds that produce a little here and there.

For fun I got a new puppy/guard dog and she LOVES tomatoes and squash.

JD's Special C-Tex production probably is a little heavier than Gary O Sena, and definitely is heavier than IS and CP. Its' flavor is almost identical, if not identical, to IS and CP. I probably like Gary O Sena's flavor slightly better, but it and JD's both have superb flavor. If you like to grow for size, Gary O' Sena makes larger fruit, and they mature earlier. Every year I'm astonished at how early Gary O' Sena produces its first harvest. It doesn't seem possible for the fruit to get that big that fast and to ripen, but it does. By the time we've harvested and eaten the first 6 or 8 fruit from it, JD's Special C-Tex is producing ripe ones, as are CP and IS. You really cannot go wrong with any of these varieties.

Bon, It's fun to find a forgotten tomato or two that way. : ) Did y'all freeze last night or do you still have the prospects of getting more?

Kim, If I was going to sell at market, I'd probably choose to go with some of the best-flavored, earlier and heaviest-producing hybrids in addition to some carefully selected heirloom types. In your climate, when heat can suddenly shut down production far too early (last year was nice and cool in June, but that's not guaranteed every year in west Texas), you'll be racing the onset of summer heat to get a good crop to market. Also, remember that the earlier you have ripe tomatoes to sell at market, the better your price per pound. People will pay more for the first ripe tomatoes of the season, and won't pay much at all once every table at market is loaded with ripe tomatoes.....that whole law of supply and demand is at play when everyone at market has tomatoes.

If I was going to grow for market in your location, I'd definitely have Early Girl, Celebrity, Big Beef, Jetstar and Supersonic on my grow list, and probably Phoenix and Tuxedo as well.

Dawn

Okiedawn,

Asking you which tomato is best is like asking you to pick which of your children you love the best. HA!

Kim, that really sounds wonderful. I'm so happy for you and your gardening success.

Auther, great thread. I needed to ponder these things. I'd like to have some early fruit set next year. I'm looking into these Dawn suggested.

Dawn, we did hit freezing. I loosely covered them with row cover material yesterday eve. They're going strong and the recent fruit doesn't have as much bug damage. They didn't produce until way late this summer so I haven't had any good raw eaters until this batch coming up - hopefully.

Duck Creek Farms informed me that they don't have Gary O' Sena seed.

I found some here I've ever ordered from this place, tho.

A gentleman named Bill Jeffers post that J.D.'s Special C-Tex tomato is a cross of Black Krim / Early Girl. According to Duck Creek Farm it might taste better than Cherokee Purple without the cracking associated with CP.

If anyone would know, it would be Mr. Jeffers who is quite the expert on tomatoes. It is true that J. D. Brann of Conroe, Texas, did say his JD's Special C-Tex is a cross of Black Krim x Early Girl, and from what I remember from the mid- to late 2000s, its original name was JD's Early Black SpeciaI C-Tex or something similar, with the "C" referring to their family greenhouse/retail plant business in Conroe, TX. I believe Mr. Brann's description since he developed it, and because it is very early and also has a flavor similar (not identical) to Black Krim. I like it better than Black Krim because it rarely cracks and I also think it is earlier and more productive than Black Krim, which are attributes it probably got from Early Girl. However, I still think that Black Krim, as grown in my garden in the soil and growing conditions that I have, has a flavor that is almost unbeatable---especially the ones that ripen in hot, dry conditions with little rainfall or irrigation to water down the flavor. However, most years I grow either BK or JD's, so I haven't often had them ripe at that exact same time so we could do impartial taste tests. For whatever reason, when I start the seed at the same time and transplant both JD's and Gary 'O Sena at the same time, GOS beats JD's with the first ripe tomato, though it really shouldn't. There is just something that GOS seems to like about our soil or growing conditions that makes it take off, grow like mad and produce like crazy too. JD's is just a bit behind it, timewise.

Okiedawn,

According to Mr. Jeffers Gary 'O Sena grows better in very rich soil, like what you have. So I doubt it would do as good in a poorer soil. J.D.'s C-Tex might be a little tougher as it was developed in Texas with the heat. I am just speculating. If it can grow in Texas it should grow any where.

I have found that all my tomatoes do better in richer soil than in poorer soil as long as the soil isn't too rich in nitrogen. When there is too much nitrogen, you still get gorgeous plants but they just don't produce as many fruit per plant. For all of its shortcomings, clay soil is very high in most nutrients and only needs compost and other organic matter added to it in order for it to have the sort of tilth needed to keep plants happy, and for that I'm grateful. It is also why I continue planting almost all of my tomato crop in the front garden instead of the back garden. (I wish I could take a gigantic mixer and mix together all my dense clay with all my sandy-silty soil as I think it would give us almost perfect soil, but that's just a pipe dream.)

When I plant tomato plants out back in the newer garden plot that has a sandy-silty soil base in most of it, the plants do not grow as lush nor do they produce as well as the tomato plants out front in the amended clay. The advantage the back garden does have is that it drains better and it is set so far back from the roadway that it never has been affected by herbicide drift. The front garden gets hit by herbicide drift every year, often multiple times, from nearby ranches, county road crews spraying herbicide on difficult-to-mow areas sloping areas along parts of nearby county roadways or from herbicides sprayed beneath utility lines and along the railroad tracks. I wish I could have the richer soil from the front garden out in the back where it is, so far, a herbicide drift-free zone, but life seldom works out that perfectly. Instead I use the thinner, less rich soil out back for plants that don't mind it: okra, southern peas, cucumbers (their growing area does at least get compost), summer and winter squash, ground cherries, beans, sometimes sweet corn (if I grow it out back, I do have to add lots of nitrogen to the soil in advance of planting) and lots of herbs. Oddly, bell peppers do great out in the back garden even though the soil there is not as rich as what they usually like, but I tend to put them in the front garden in the richer soil. Sweet corn also does pretty well out back but does better out front, which is fine with me because I like to use it as a barrier planting between the road and the tomato/pepper plants. Generally, in a normal year when rain doesn't keep me from getting the back garden planted, I'll grow early and late corn in the front garden and mid-season corn in the back.

When I lived in Texas, which is where I was born, grew up and lived the first 39 years of my life before moving to Oklahoma, I could grow any tomato variety I chose, heirloom or hybrid, and they all grew well and produced great every year. It probably helped that my dad grew tomatoes all my life, so I knew that we had to plant very early to beat the heat and to choose plants with the right DTMs in order to get a crop before the usual insane summer heat set in. The heat is the biggest challenge in Texas because it often gets very hot there very early, which shuts down production of fruit even earlier there than here. To some extent you can work around that by planting fruit that produce smaller to medium fruit (Early Girl, Champion, Celebrity, Mule Team, Ace, Porter) or that produce medium-sized fruit (Fantastic, Super Fantastic, Carmello, Mule Team, Sioux, Super Sioux, Marglobe, Better Boy, Jubilee, Box Car Willie, Homestead, Livingston's Golden Queen, Lemon Boy, Sunray and Roma).

Most of the varieties that produce big tomatoes for me here in Oklahoma never produced very many fruit down in Texas as the heat arrived so early that it shut them down before they'd had time to flower and set much fruit. I think the fact that our nights stay cooler well into May here in OK and, in a rainy/cool year, even into early June, gives enough time for the larger-fruited plants to produce great fruitset here, and I mean varieties like Big Boy, Dr. Wyche's Yellow, Big Rainbow, Aunt Ruby's German Green, Persimmon, Lillian's Yellow and virtually all the blacks and purples we've already discussed, and all the big pinks (Pruden's Purple, Stump of the World, Soldacki, German Johnson, German Pink, German Head, Mortgage Lifter, Polish, Greek Rose and Pink Brandywine) and lots of the other big reds like Neve's Azorean Red, OTV Brandywine, Cuostralee, Beefsteak. It was wonderful to learn I could grow the bigger fruited varieties here and get much better fruitset than they can produce in Texas most years. My dad grew some big ones (like Spring Giant and Big Boy) in Texas, but was very careful to match the varieties he planted with the sort of rainfall year that was expected. He grew all kinds of big fruited varieties in much of the 1960s and 1970s, but then had to switch to more of the smaller-fruited varieties in the 1980s and 1990s which were not nearly as rainy as the 1960s and 1970s, except for an occasional El Nino year like 1997-98 when rainfall was off-the-charts wonderful. He had rich, black, gumbo clay which is even better for growing tomatoes than sandy loam (as long as you add organic matter to the black gumbo) or red clay and his tomatoes gave him high yields that were amazing. I doubt I've ever had as high of a yield from my plants as he got from his, but he did use synthetic fertilizers. I probably could get the higher yields he got if I would use synthetic fertilizers at regular intervals throughout the season as he did, but instead I just focus on building the soil, enriching and feeding the soil and letting the soil feed the plants. I'm stubborn that way.

I still have to plant very, very early here to get large yields, which is why I risk the plants and try to get them in the ground sometime in March, but I do that with the knowledge that freezing nights and frosts still are possible and I keep the heavy duty frost blanket type row cover handy so I can throw it over the tomato plants on cold nights. Most of my best tomato years, in terms of yield, have come when I got the plants into the ground in early to mid-March. Even planting later than that, like in late March, cuts the yields I'll get significantly in all but the coolest, rainiest years. If I wait and plant in April, which is a much safer planting time in OK due to our cooler nights, I probably get only half the yield as I do if I plant a month earlier. The later in April I plant, the lower the yields. It took me a few years, of course, to figure all this out. I am obsessed with planting early to get great yields and also an earlier harvest. My first 4-8 tomato plants go into large pots in mid-February every year, and from those plants, which I can carry indoors on very cold nights, we get tomatoes around the end of April, sometimes as early as April 20-24, but more often, around April 25-30. When a person loves eating tomatoes as much as I do, that early effort to get ripe fruit 4-6 weeks earlier than usual is well worth it. It always freaks out people we know here in our area who put their tomato plants in the ground around April 10-20, to know we are harvesting our first ripe fruit from those plants in large pots about the same time they're finishing up their planting, but they are not die-hard, tomato-obsessed maniacs like Tim and I are.

The only thing I've tried here and didn't think was worth the effort was growing tomatoes in winter. Before I had a greenhouse, I'd grow small to medium sized plants in pots and carry them into the well-insulated garage on cold nights or into the house. Then, I tried growing them in the greenhouse in winter, but without a heater because I just don't want to have to worry about keeping a greenhouse warm enough on all those cold autumn, winter and early spring nights. Whether grown in pots on the patio that were carried inside at night, or in the greenhouse all winter long, I found the fruit to remain very small, grow and ripen very slowly and have such poor flavor that it was no better than grocery store tomatoes, so I gave up bothering with winter tomatoes. Now I just preserve lots of tomatoes in summer so we have canned, frozen and sun-dried tomatoes (albeit, dried in my oven and not out in the sun) in winter, which aren't as good as fresh summer tomatoes, but still taste better than grocery store or home-grown winter tomatoes.

Okiedawn,

Thank goodness for poor sandy soil or there wouldn't be any place to plant okra & peas. My Grandmother always gardened and loved her sandy soil because as she put it you can't make good peas in clay dirt it has to be sandy. She also thought that purple hull peas were the salvation of the world, if she had a pea patch she could survive any catastrophe.

My Grandmother used to tell a story that her Grandmother used to tell about during the Civil War how when the Union Troops came through where they lived in Tennessee they stole every thing the cattle, chickens, horses, pigs, & field corn. But for some reason they didn't bother the peas and if it had not been for them they would have starved to death. I don't know if that was a tall tell or not but it was gospel for her.

I prefer sandy soil but I have been able to get reasonably good southern pea and okra harvests out of well-amended clay. Having said that, I get better yields per plant out of the sandy soil. The southern pea plants grown in clay get a lot more lush and green but the ones grown in sandy soil produce a higher yield. There's also a variety of southern pea called "Iron and Clay" that grows well in clay and often is used as a great green manure crop. I don't like the peas from that variety as well as some others, but I've always been partial to all of the purple hull pea varieties and that's not likely to change. I usually grow okra in both the front and back. I get better yields in the back garden, but prettier plants in the front garden. Who says you can't have both? I'm not space-challenged, so I can repeat some of the same plants in both gardens if I want to, and in some drought years that pays off when overall yields are reduced due to lack of moisture.

My grandparents had sandy soil in Krum, TX, when I was a child and had amazing gardens. My grandfather could grow anything. I remember at least one year when my grandmother grew strawberries right there in the flower bed beside the house, right beside the porch. I just thought it was magic that she could grow strawberries because we couldn't grow them in our black gumbo clay in Fort Worth.

I have heard the same stories about southern peas in the Civil War days----that the northern soldiers disdained the southern peas as cattle food or field peas. That's a good thing, I guess, as it enabled people like my dad's parents' families to survive a very tough period in southern history, and then to eventually end up in Texas, where corn, southern peas and pinto beans helped them and their children (my paternal grandparents) survive the recurring droughts of the Dust Bowl years. My dad used to tell us stories of eating corn meal and/or beans three times a day for months on end. It would be something like corn meal mush for breakfast, cornbread for lunch and corn cakes or cornbread with pinto beans for dinner. All our childhood we had red beans and cornbread, often with southern greens like collard greens or turnip greens, for dinner every single Wednesday night, and that was because my dad loved them so. Despite a childhood of great deprivation and too many meals of only beans and cornbread, he still thought pinto beans, cornbread and turnip greens were just a wonderful dinner. We spoiled children of the 1960s/70s couldn't understand why we were eating a meatless meal (except for the bits of bacon cooked with the beans to help flavor them), but we understood it was a meal that was special to him so we kept our opinions to ourselves and ate his favorite meal every week. I still can make a dinner out of them, though I don't make them weekly, and I prefer purplehull peas to pinto beans myself.

Okiedawn,

My Dad was raised on what he called mush, made from boiling water & cornmeal. When he went to the army during WWII he was at Camp Campbell KY. now Fort Campbell. After Basic training they were allowed a pass if they lived with in a close distance from Camp Campbell. Of course him being from Okla. it was to far away for him to go home but another soldier from North Carolina who was a good friend invited him to go home with him as he lived close enough to the base. My Dad said all his friend could talk about was how he couldn't wait to get home and have some of his Mom's grits as nobody could make them as good as her. My Dad thought those grits must really be something and couldn't wait to taste them. They got to the friends home late and the mother put them to bed and ask what they wanted for breakfast, the friend told her that they wanted grits. So the next morning when my Dad sit down to the breakfast table the mother set a big bowl of steaming grits in front of him, he said to his surprise it wasn't nothing but a big ol' bowl of cornmeal mush just like back home. One man's grits are another man's mush.

Okiedawn,

Have you ever grown any Cherokee Chocolate tomatoes? I understand that they are supposed to be a mutation of Cherokee Purple. According to every thing that is posted on the web they are bigger and don't have the cracking that CP has.

I would like to get a good size black tomato without the cracking that the CP has. I like the taste but I have to throw away nearly as many as I can eat. Plus the grasshoppers & other bugs get in the cracks and make a mess eating there.

Has anyone grown Chocolate Stripe tomatoes?

Thanks Dawn. I will add some of those to my list. Catalogs are coming and almost time to firm up my lists. I have to an inventory. Many of my tomato seeds were used up last year. I won't be planting near as many in the glam per. Lol

Luvncannin, have you thought about winter sowing? There is a whole forum here on Gardenweb to read up on it. Trudi also has a website and facebook group. It would save pn indoor seed starting space