It's been an adventurous summer for tomatoes at my house. Nothing ripened until Aug. 28 except my Sun Gold cherry tomatoes.

Sun Gold is a knockout winner for taste and production, but the plants need a field all to themselves. They make a tangled mess of 10-foot stems that covered my Cherokee Purple tomatoes and my bush beans. Every time I cut them back, I lost a lot of cherry tomatoes that would have been ripe in a few days.When I'm conflicted like that, I tend to become crazy. So I pulled out the bush beans and made a device out of a trellis to keep Sun Gold from overwhelming Cherokee Purple.It sort of worked, but where was the reward when Cherokee Purple wouldn't ripen? Then, in the last week of August, Cherokee Purple came through. What a delicious tomato! Sorry Sun Gold. You never could fill a sandwich. You're a one-trick pony stuck in the salad bar.Sweet Sue was the dark horse. Sweet Sue is a product of the Dwarf Tomato Project, a collaboration between an American tomato breeder in North Carolina and his counterpart in Australia. The goal is to grow big juicy slicing tomatoes on dwarf tomato plants. The plant is like any big indeterminate tomato except that the individual stems don't exceed 5 feet in height.What I didn't know is that dwarf tomatoes are not patio tomatoes or container tomatoes. Their height may be fixed, but their girth isn't. Sweet Sue had the stems of a broccoli. She had the leaves of a potato. She had elbows. I never saw anything like her.I didn't know how to prune Sweet Sue, so she kept getting wider. Eventually she overran her space and started toward Sun Gold. Sun Gold went high and Sweet Sue went low. If Sue hadn't contracted tomato blight, I don't know how it would have ended.Sadly, I had to pull Sweet Sue before she had any ripe tomatoes. She was the Typhoid Mary of the garden. Her leaf blight was catching.I saved the green tomatoes that looked promising when I cut Sweet Sue up for garbage. One of her tomatoes ripened quickly in the house, so I took it to the Penn State Extension hotline this morning and shared it. Sweet Sue is a delicious tomato. Her flavor is complex. She is sweet with an acidic note like balsamic vinegar. Cherokee Purple is an amazing tomato, but Sweet Sue is something unique.Next year I'm going to grow my tomatoes in tomato bags. No more crop rotation or tomatoes taking over. If they need space, I can move the bags. My bell peppers did better in gro-bags than the ones planted in my raised beds. I could pull them closer to the building and protect them from downpours. I could move them so they got more sun. With tomato bags I feel like I'm in control. Did I say that?