Looks great! Is stupice more well-suited for containers? Wondering why you put that one in the 5 gallon bucket vs the others.

Thanks. Good questions. I don't know if they are more suited for containers. Probably not. Imo, in-ground is preferable. Where we recently moved from in northern NY, we had a wet property, and just got used to containers. Wasn't sure about the soil, bugs and diseases here in south Georgia, so the containers are familiar and seem more controllable. As you can see I put the Creole in the ground as an experiment. It's only half as big as the others. Container tomatoes grow fast! I used the 5 gallon bucket for the Stupice to actually cut down on the harvest a bit. I find the early and mid season ones are the best, and am usually tired of them eventually. Not sure the strategy worked too well though, there is about 100 on it already and its 5 feet tall.

That is an interesting point about trying to cut down on the
harvest with the 5 gallon bucket. I
imagine the plant gets a bit stressed earlier and that could potentially lead
to more fruit set or maybe faster ripening.

I have also noticed that container tomatoes seem to grow
faster. I had a few extra transplants
last year that I put out into pots/buckets on a whim. That was almost a month after the others were
planted in raised beds and the container grown plants outpaced a good bit of
the raised bed plants. They also did
experience die-off earlier (primarily due to being underwatered, I think).

I need to remember to tuck a few buckets here and there within
the garden (and outside) this year.

Good luck!

using a 5 gal bucket will definitely cut back on yield/length they will produce. if that is your goal then might want to cut off everything (flowers) that are above the cage if there is already average size tomatoes on the lower half. the chance of that top section producing anything else worth harvesting is practically zero. any tomatoes that do manage to form will be golf ball size, so might as well prune it so it uses that energy elsewhere.

personally, i go through a lot of time and effort planting, maintaining, etc. so i want the plants to keep producing as long as possible. if i have more than enough, i start giving them away.. and you don't have to eat them all until you get tire of them (what weirdo gets tired of tomatoes anyway? JK).. i can them, make sauce, etc.. if i make lots of sauce i'll freeze for later use. nothing like making a nice tomato sauce, freezing it and being able to eat a close-to-fresh batch of sauce come Dec/Jan. it beats any sauce you can buy in the store any day.

Well you're right, I'm weird, can't help getting the tomato gags :-) at some point. But just at the point I get the gags, my wife starts cleaning off the plants to start canning :-) In my experience, the plant will keep producing as long as it's fed and watered. But being a smaller plant than it would be in a 15 gal container, it produces less. It will be interesting to see how it performs in the extreme heat and humidity here. I expect that even with spraying it will die of some disease in July. It's already in the mid 80s here and getting more humid.