I have grown Celebrity in a 10 gallon pot with fairly good success but that is with drip irrigation on a timer and weekly feeding. A bigger container would do better.

But yes there are many determinate varieties that are smaller (Celeb is really a semi-indeterminate) and there are many varieties developed specifically for container growing (and several with better flavor too). Many of them will let you get by with just a 7 gallon container.

Bush Champion, Better Bush, the new "dwarf varieties, Bella Rosa, Bradley, Black Krim, just to name a few off the top of my head.

Check out the Container Gardening forum here for many more variety suggestions.

Lack of sun? Of course anything you can do to improve that will help greatly.

Dave

Thank you for this very helpful information. I guess I will have to find one of the dwarf varieties. This celebrity will have to make do in the sunniest spot in the ground, no pots large enough.
I appreciate your help, Beth

What size containers do you have?

Dave

My two largest pots are 20"wide 17" deep here is a photo, I could get another of this size or empty these two. I am considering ordering two smart pots-are the knock offs just as good if cheaper? Anyway- I could get a 20 gallon and a 10 gallon smart pot.(I have a $25 gift card). At this point the cost of the soil mix and purchasing pots is starting to make me wonder if I couldn't be happy to just buy tomatoes and peppers at the grocery store....but then what to do with my soil mixes?
P.S. not sure why the photo is sideways it is upright on the computer?

I appreciate your help and patience with my newbe questions.
Beth

I love Smart Pots. Don't know the knock-offs.

For the pots you have do you grow your own transplants from seed or buy transplants? Growing your own gives you hundreds of choices. Buying transplants will limit you to just a few choices. See what varieties are available in your area and let us know.

Dave

babelsrus, to calculate the size of a round pot in gallons, you need to know the width of the inside of the pot at both the top and the bottom, also the height of the soil inside the pot.

Add the top width and the bottom width and divide by 2. That gives you the average width of the pot.

Figure the average area of a slice of the pot by taking half the average width, squaring that, and multiplying the result by pi (3.14).

Multiply that result by the height of the soil inside the pot.

Divide that by 231 (the number of square inches in a gallon). That's the size of the pot in gallons.

Ok, so these pots are approx. 13.5 gallon pots. In these pots I tried growing tomato plants from walmart that were marked down-a cherry tomato-? and sungold sounds familiar, they didn't produce more then a couple and I think the ones they did were already set when I purchased them. In the ground I grew purple cherokee seedlings from a local plant swap and a big boy and early girl from Walmart?I had better luck in the ground but totally didn't water or fertilize enough.

I am not questioning missing's formulas above but the application of it. There are standard conversion tables for dry mix available from nursery and commercial grower associations.

The average 20" straight-sided pot holds 10 gallons of dry mix soil. Taper sided pots will be 1 -1.5 gallons less. The distinction is dry measurements vs. liquid measurements.

Straight-side nursery pots

a 4" pot= pint
a 5/6" pot= quart
an 7/8" pot= gallon
a 10" pot = 3 gallon
a 14" pot= 7 gallon
a 20" pot= 10 gallon
a 24" pot = 15 gal
a 30" pot= 20 gal
a 35" pot = 25/30 gal

Based on fill to within 1" of the top rim.

Dave

Dave, I'm not sure where I originally found the 231 cubic inches per gallon number, but it appears to be a liquid gallon, and is the only figure I find online for liquid gallons.

The figure for dry gallons seems to be 268.8 cu. in. (which would be 1.16 liquid gallons).

Okay ... so how large is a 5-gallon bucket? Well, the one in the basement which I bought at Lowe's is a dry 5.0 gallons (within measurement error). Which is the same as 5.82 liquid gallons.

And if you filled that 5-gallon bucket to within an inch of the rim and planted a dwarf tomato in it, the 5-gallon bucket would hold about 5.48 liquid gallons, or 4.71 dry gallons.

This is just going to be one of those things I don't see the logic of. Dry mix is not a fixed volume: it can be compressed; it can be fluffed up.

[I am now wishing I could go back to the custodian's closet in the library where I used to work and take a look at the 5-gallon buckets of custodial supplies ... all of which held liquids ... to see what size they really were....]