The seeds you sent me arrived in the morning mail. My oh my, it is like Christmas and my birthday all in one. Thanks a million!

I'm going to try to plant them all this year which will mean further revision to my 2010 Grow List and I'll have to break/improve new ground to have room for all of them. Since it looks like we'll have a wet spring, it should be a good year to try a lot of new varieties since adequate rainfall is likely.

I have tried and tried and tried to cut my 2010 Tomato Grow List down and instead it is growing longer by the day. That is the story of my life. I think it is likely this year that I'll be growing the most varieties of tomatoes since 2006. (That was my 140-variety, 400-plus plant year. There won't be that many plants this year, but there will be a lot of varieties.)

Dawn

Diane

Yep, I suppose we are a crazy bunch of enablers. We're just trying to spread tomato happiness around the region.

Jan,

For years and years I got away planting anything I wanted any place in the yard that I wanted and the deer/rabbits only bothered a few things from time to time....mainly cool-season crops, and sunflowers, hollyhocks, hostas and okra for the deer and mostly young seedlings of all kinds for the rabbits. Then, the deer suddenly seemed to 'discover' the garden one year and for the next couple of years they periodially raided the garden and ate everything in sight. I have a 7' tall fence around the garden now and I can plant anything I want inside of it, but still have lots of trouble with anything outside that fence and having to plant inside the fence means my garden is half the size it used to be several years ago. I'm hoping to break ground/fence in a much larger area this year so I can expand the garden back to the size it was prior to 2006 (when the deers went wild).

I still have a couple of gallons of dehydrated tomatoes and frozen tomatoes in the freezer (and canned tomatoes in the cellar), and every time we eat some of them it is almost like it is spring or summer all over again. I did a much better job this year of freezing, canning and dehydrating all the excess tomatoes (instead of giving them all away) so we've been able to enjoy them all winter long.

I really tried to reign myself in and plan on fewer varieties and fewer total plants this year, but I've lost that battle. Of course, we'll have to see what the weather does because I can raise all the seedlings in the world inside but if the weather doesn't cooperate, I may not get them all into the ground at the proper planting time.

Dawn

James I answered your email. I will be checking to see what I have of what you want.

Jeff I know the feeling. And sure you aren't near as overloaded as I am. LOL. I do have the room. Although that kind of talk brings a sad face to my horses faces. LOL.
Jay

Tomatoes are really popular around my house. When I got back into gardening again, when the youngest was about 2, I had about 30 different kinds. I was so excited to try them all, but everytime I got ready to go and pick them, the ones that were ripe would be gone! I kept thinking squirrels, or something, then caught my youngest around the corner of the house, pockets filled, and a pile of tomatoes next to him, shoving them into his mouth! The little sneak had been eating them this whole time!! How he knew when they were ripe, I have no idea. LOL!

Now he's almost 9 (on Saturday!), and our big treat is to go to the Tomato Man's Daughter in the Spring. He gets so excited trying out new varieties. The problem is, we have most of them, now!

Jay-whereabouts are you located?

Shelly

If you had come by for lunch, not only could you have had tomatoes (I rehydrate the dehydrated ones in water for about 30 minutes and they plump up nicely), but we also had black-eyed peas and jalapeno poppers, both from our own garden produce. Since you weren't here, I ate your share of the tomatoes. I made the poppers from jalapenos that I had cut in half and de-seeded and then frozen back in the summer and fall when the plants were producing heavily.

Eating food from the garden, even if it was frozen, deydrated or canned in between harvest time and eating time still makes the spring weather seem a little closer.

NOW is the time that all the many hours spent in the garden and the kitchen really pays off. Because we had incredible rainfall last year (a rareity in Love County), my garden overproduced and we filled up 3 freezers plus I canned over 300 jars of this, that and the other....and we ate fresh food from the garden all spring, summer and fall. This may be the first year I have frozen, canned and dehydrated enough tomatoes to get us completely through the winter and spring without running out. In many past years, I just gave away many of the extra produce, but this year I made a concerted effort to preserve all I could.

I am of the belief you can never have too many tomatoes as long as they are home-grown ones. I absolutely, positively will not eat a grocery store tomato. When we order hamburgers, I remove those slice of reddish mushy poorly-flavored so-called tomatoes and toss them.

Jay, I will readily concede to being more addicted to growing and eating tomatoes than mot people, but when it comes to spreading the addiction....you outrank me.

James, After you and Jay figure out which tomatoes on your list he has, let me know what you're still looking for and I might have them.

Shelly, Jay's list was posted back in the summer, so if you weren't reading this forum back then, you might have missed it. I'll see if I can find it and bump it back up to the top of the page. Jay has been very kind and very generous and shared many seeds with many of us this past year.

I need to warn Jay that all he is going is creating 'empty space' in his seed collection that he then can fill up with other seeds. I gave away oodles and oddles of odds and ends of leftover tomato seed packets last year in an effort to clean up/clean out my seed box, and I think it is likely that I have more tomato varieties now than I had last year before the giveaway. Those of us who "must" have tomato seeds are collectors as much as we are gardeners. Just ask Carol about that whole seed collecting thing she's really gotten into! LOL

Dawn

Shelly, If you shop at Lisa's, you may really have something Jay wants to trade for. He wanted The Yellow 1884 Pinkheart and Grandma Suzy's Beefsteak a little while back. Have you grown those? I had about seven of her top ten, but he wanted the ones that I didn't have. It is rare to find a seed to "trade" with Jay, because he has everything.

Shelly

Shelly I may take you up on that offer. I have the Yellow 1884 Pink Oxheart seeds coming. But there is a few more I would like either seeds or plants of.

Carol I may be pulling the plastic back on the greenhouse and growing in it if I don't do some serious culling. Jay

I am also a nut for peppers but some of them are small so I can squeeze them in here and there. A few years ago I had a carpenter working for me for several weeks and I had him change an inside stairway that was just way to steep and put a landing at the top. He cut the stringers without me knowing it and he had them too steep. I bought more boards and had him do them over again. I was out in my shed and saw those stringers, and decided that I am going to go buy some 2 x 12 and use those stringers and build me some "bleachers" to set smaller pots on. I can put them up against the fence where I have so many roots that I killed out, but that still haven't rotted enough for it to be a good planting area. At least the Virginia Creeper plant seems to be dead even if the roots aren't gone yet. Since I have several hundred containers, that shouldn't be a problem. Not many of them are large enough for tomatoes, but they will do for smaller plants.

I think I will wait until about the 20th to start my seeds. I worked on the census 10 years ago in southern Oklahoma and decided that I would probably do that again for this census. I filled out an application and took the test last year and everything just seemed to die. I had almost forgotten about it. On Saturday, they called me and asked if I could be in Tahlequah Tuesday morning for supervisor school. With 2 storms coming in this week, I will probably just stay down there all week, but I am not looking forward to that early morning trip on Tuesday with rain and snow in the forecast for tonight and tomorrow night. I will have to do a lot of early morning gardening in the Spring, until I can finish with the census.

Dawn the only one of James requests I didn't have seeds for was Better Boy. Did include a few seeds of Ramapo as a substitute. But sure he might still want Better Boy. Didn't have the Country Taste or Rutgers Melissa asked for. But overall had most of those requested.

Leava if you will send your address I'll send some seeds. I'll try to send a few I hope will work for you. If you sent an email it didn't get through. Jan sent one that didn't also. You two are the last that I remember I had requests from.

If anyone had requested seeds and hasn't heard from me please email me again. I have old timers memory. LOL. But try to save emails and didn't find any more saved emails. Jay

OK, I have the seeds that James and Melissa both need, so...

James, if you see this, e-mail me your snail mail address and I'll send you Better Boy seeds, and

Melissa, e-mail me your snail mail address and I'll see you seeds of Country Taste and Rutgers.

If you two e-mail, please post here and tell me that so I can watch for the e-mails. Sometimes mail doesn't come through the GW mail system and sometimes it does.

Jay, My tomato seeds are started and my onions are due to arrive next week. It is starting to feel a little more like spring except for the snow still on the ground.

Wish you all were here...I'm thawing a bag of dehydrated tomatoes right now and will be snacking on them soon. Nothing makes winter feel more like summer than that fresh tomato flavor.

Dawn

I received your e-mail and I'll put the seeds in the mail either tomorrow or Monday, and you are welcome.

Dawn

I had sent you an email a while back. I sent it through GW. I'll resend it. Let me know if you get it.

Thanks,

Shelly

Dawn

Thanks so much for the seeds. They arrived on Friday, and I sowed them today. James

Is it Spring yet?

Wasn't it fun planting? It makes it feel like spring will come. This morning on The Weather Channel they said "only 27 more days until Spring" and I was thinking "man, a whole 27 days....that's still so far away".

It is another cloudy-gray, gloomy, wet morning. Light rain is falling now although we had 2 or 3 bands of T-storms blow through in the pre-dawn (no pun intended) hours, complete with thunder, lightning and hard rainfall. Luckily, they were fast-moving so the hard rain only fell for a few minutes with each band. I'm hearing thunder right now, so guess another band of heavier storms is nearby.

On days like this, I fear spring is much too far away and will arrive late, but one sunny day changes my mind.

I am going to start another 6 or 8 kinds of tomatoes and about another dozen kinds of peppers today. I never know when to quit because I want to grow them all.

Dawn

Last night we had fog, lightning, drizzle, sleet and snow. Didn't amount to much. Supposed to be dreary and cold all day. And lower 30's tomorrow then start another warm up. One nice thing is it has slowed up the trees from wanting to bloom. Hopefully when it breaks it will be for good. The critters keep acting like something is getting closer but don't see a lot in the forecast. Maybe they are like me and getting tired of being cooped up. LOL. Jay

You have had more interesting weather than we have....we only had thunderstorms and rain and fog. The thunderstorms with all that lighning and thunder did make it seem more like a spring storm than a winter storm.

Our forecast snow for tomorrow/Tuesday is starting to diminish.....since yesterday afternoon, the computer models show the main body of the storm going south of the D-FW metroplex, so the snow is likely to fall in the Brownsville to Waco to possibly San Angelo area instead of falling up here.

Your animals are likely anticipating next weekend's front, which forecast models are predicting will be very cold and wet. Of course, models are usually wrong a week in advance, but we'll keep watching and see what we get.

I've been in a couple of nurseries and garden centers this weekend. I've noticed that all of the stores here have replaced the tomato plants that froze to death (because no one had the sense to move them inside) during last week's snow. Instead of blackened, withered tomato plants, they now have oodles of tomato plants with yellow and purple lower leaves. Looking at them makes me glad I grow almost all my own....and these were BP plants so you think they'd be doing their best to send out healthy-looking plants.

Dawn