The type of plant you have, the amount of water (whether natural rain or manual), and container type will make a big difference on the type of mix and how your plant responds in your environment. I think that sometimes we overthink it too much for a plant that is basically only going to be grown as an annual. People have posted great results for tomatoes growing in 5-gallon paint buckets, tires, actual bags of soil as the "container", rubbermaid totes, half whiskey barrels, fancy clay pots, plastic square pots, foam pots, etc., etc. The big thing to consider is your climate - ie., does it get brutally hot all season with little rain or does it fluctuate with hot periods and cooler periods with rain or does it stay cool all summer, etc.? Do you get lazy (or go away alot) during summer and can't water as often or do you baby your plants and try to water them every day whether they may need it or not (out of habit)? Do you get full blazing sun all day long or just morning sun or mainly afternoon sun? Are the plants sitting on concrete? Grass? Black asphalt? Gravel? Wood decking? Basically, over time, you would learn about your area's climate, the actual growing area's microclimate, as well as your natural watering practices, and would then adjust your mix and container type to best fit that. And as an FYI, my mother insists on getting bagged soil rather than a soiless mix and based on her yard, sun exposure, and her watering habits, her container tomatoes and peppers blow mine away by a longshot (she has a south-facing spot for her plants where mine are on a NE-facing covered balcony getting little or no overhead sun but full morning sun and a little in the afternoon in the corner where I position mine). It's the most remarkable thing to see but the whole debate about soil in containers seems to get thrown out after watching her container production year after year after year. Last year, she planted some 12" - 18" tall tomatoes and peppers in pure "Miracle Gro" vegetable and bedding soil (the kind you dump in a bed) at the end of May and by July, her plants looked like this: By August, they looked like this, sprawled all over (she moved her peppers to a different spot as some of the fruit were getting scalded): Apparently, the heavy wettish "soil" that she uses for her containers sitting in full blazing sun was kept in a sort of balance due to the tomato foliage helping to act as a shade over that soil to keep it from getting rock hard too quickly, and thus the soil's tendency to retain moisture helped the roots deal with the sun. So I just say, do some experimenting to see what works best because often things don't always pan out the way that would make any sense whatsover, but the environment and your care practices will be more the determining factor. ;-)

Me too. I have visions of seed packets and seed flats dancing in my head. Yesterday we had some sunshine and it was easy to think spring was closer than it is. Today it has been gray and overcast with a misty, drizzly bit of something falling every now and then, so it is a bit easier to remind myself it is still winter. Everyone who's wanting to jump the gun and start some seeds now, repeat after me...it is still winter, it is still winter, it is still winter. There are several ways to dehydrate tomatoes. I generally do it the simple way. I start picking whichever bite-sized tomatoes are fully ripe. I try to put at least 1 tomato in the bucket for each 1 I put into my mouth. I take the survivors (those are the ones I didn't eat or the ones I didn't drop on the ground and then step on) inside, wash them, drain them and let them drip dry in the colander. I slice them in half, but leave the two halves just barely attached to one another so I can handle two halves at one time when transferring them from the cutting board to the cookie sheet. I line them all up nice and neat, close but not touching (well, the two halves of each tomato touch because they are still attached but they don't touch anything else) on cookie sheets. I place the cut-side up and the skin side down so they'll dry more quickly. My oven has three racks so I generally dry 3 cookie sheets of tomatoes at one time. In general, I'm not an overly "neat" or fussy person, but all my tomato rows on the cookie sheets have to be lined up nice and neat and 'just so'. Why? Just because. I turn on the oven, choose the 'dehydrate' feature and choose my temperature from the available dehyrating options. I get busy doing other stuff and forget about them for a while. Eventually the whole house is scented with the most delicious aroma. Anyone who comes to the house while I'm dehydrating tomatoes doesn't want to leave. They just want to sit there and inhale that fragrant tomatoey aroma. When the tomatoes have been in about one-half as long as I think they'll take to dehydrate (based on prior experience), I start checking them every 30 or 45 minutes. When they have dried down to the right moisture level, I remove them from the dehydrator and let them cool on the cookie sheets. Once they are cool, I put them into quart sized freezer zip-lock bags. I put the quart-sized freezer bags into 1-gallon or 2-gallon freezer bagas, so that I don't have to carry a lot of quart bags to the freezer or deal with them loose in the freezer. I just add more quart bags to a bigger bag in the freezer until the larger zip-lock is full. In a good year, as a minimum I'll put several thousand bite-sized tomatoes into the freezer. In the "off season", I eat them many different ways. Sometimes I eat them in their dried state....just like eating raisins, only their color is prettier (oranges, reds, pinks, yellows instead of brown or golden raisins). I might eat handfuls of them as a snack, or just a handful tossed into a salad. Sometimes I'll put them in a cup or bowl, add water and rehydrate them. Then, we can toss them into a salad or eat as snacks or as a side dish on a plate. Sometimes I'll toss a handful of them into a soup, casserole or even into salsa to make it more "tomatoey". If I am careful and ration them out, I won't run out until maybe March. You can get fancy and marinate them in red wine or some other agent that will give them a good flavor, but the tradeoff is that they are absorbing moisture as they marinate and will take longer to dehydrate. You can drizzle them with extra-virgin olive oil and sprinkle herbs or a little salt on them before you dehydrate them. The ones brushed with olive oil will take a long time to dry. If you dehydrate them down to a low-enough moisture level, you can store them in a cool, dark place like a closet or pantry and not keep them in the freezer. I prefer the freezer though as extra insurance. Since different sizes of tomatoes dry more quickly or more slowly than the others, I try to segregate my tomatoes by size and dry only similarly-sized ones on each cookie sheet. Usually, I'll have one cookie sheet of black cherries, one of the rest of the 'average' sized ones, and one that has only the tiny currant sized ones (they dry really fast and have to come out of the oven much sooner than the others). In a pinch, when the harvest is very heavy, I can put two cookie sheets on each rack if I turn them lengthwise facing the door. I don't really like drying six trays of tomatoes at once, but it can be done. The only really stringent rule I have is that I absolutely, positively cannot eat more than half a batch of dehydrated tomatoes while they are cooling. This can be a very hard rule to enforce. So, if I pick 1,000 bite-sized tomatoes in the garden and eat 500 of them while I'm picking, and then I eat 250 of the dried ones while they're cooling and being transferred to freezer bags for storage....then I'll get 250 dried tomatoes from a picking of 1,000. (And Tim wonders where all those little tomatoes go all summer long! If he'd watch me work, he'd know where they are going.) Actually, I often show a lot of restraint and barely eat any of the dried ones the minute they come out of the oven. You believe that, right?

I like the 5 gal bucket idea for the best flexibility. Even given lots of space I could see myself always keeping many plants in 5 gal containers. I did put 2 inches of rock on the bottom with holes 1 inch from the on the side. My favorite aspect of this is they can be started in a green house and moved outside as is with no transplant. You may even able to go in ground somewhat and just use large holes which would allow you to pull the up and rotate the soil. If you are getting soil born disease, yank the container and put the soil in black plastic garbage bags and heat it up on the drive way during the summer months and rotate back into the containers with new compost. If your native soil is that bad it will not help your plants any how. I am so completely impressed by this mountain garden operation it has inspired me to do the same. It then simply occurred to me this year that I can start these in a portable green house. http://www.el34world.com/Misc/Garden/Garden2007_6.htm

I ended up with a cherry fort - not a maze. The signif other decided to downsize the whole deal... so I ended up with a 10 X 10 area. We were starting with lawn... So I planted a tomato every 6-8 inches. I know inches... I put in: Gajo De Melon Suncherry red star sungold green doctors zebra cherry black cherry snow white Riesentraube OSU Blue Oh heavens, I'll have to go home and check again... there were others... I got a lot of people who wanted to donate seed, so I took them up on them and added them to the 'fort'. I have to take recent pictures, but this is what it looked like early on. I haven't been gung-ho on documenting this because I didn't want to document a complete failure if it happened... :) Then I went back to the original farm (without my camera) this weekend and they have extended their tomato maze - lots more varieties and much bigger this year... I will bring the camera next time I go. Again they told the kids "come back with your basket and belly full." SO cute and SO gets them excited about gardening. I want that!!! I'll take pictures tonight and post them tonight or tomorrow.