Micamom, I was going to suggest dwarf zinnias or celosia, but when we gardened in Fort Worth, spider mites attacked a lot of things in the hot Texas summers. I know they will go after zinnias. As you know, they really love marigolds. I haven't seen them get celosia, but we are now in Maine with much cooler summers, which aren't conducive to spider mites. The moss rose (portulaca) suggested by quirkpod would be a good thing to try. There are a lot of fancy new varieties of portulaca. However, I would personally hate to give up on petunias. I will be starting some soon. If Tobacco Budworms or any other larva of moths or butterflies gave me a problem, I would spray liberally and frequently with a Bacillus Thuringiensis containing product. BT is a safe non-toxic biological control that I have found to be very effective. I use a lot of it. Right now, I have saturated my indoor seed-starting medium (Premier Pro-Mix with extra Perlite) with water that had little pieces of Mosquito Dunk in it. That very effectively prevents fungus gnats and doesn't hurt the plants. It kills any larva in the starting medium. I use BT in the form of Mosquito Dunks (available from Home Depot and many other stores), but BT is available in several other products as well. I will be deploying some Mosquito Dunks very soon now in the little brook that runs through this property as a control for black fly larva and I will be deploying it later in any standing pools to control mosquitoes. It is also reasonably effective against cabbage loopers and corn earworms. I am not an organic gardener, but I use many of their methods and I very much prefer safe, non-toxic controls because of our little grandaughter, who is very curious about everything, indoors and out. MM

I too have had something eating my petunias this year, I did find a web site that offered help, www.garden-services.com/petunia. Here's what they had to say; One of the most common pests of petunias is the budworm caterpillar. These small green worms appear in late June and July. You won't often see the worm itself. Instead, you'll see the droppings, which often are described as small black seeds. The worms feed on the flower buds, making small holes in the buds and the leaves. These caterpillars are difficult to control but Dipel, Thuricide, Talstar and Scimitar are reasonably effective insecticides. Sevin and Diazinon aren't effective, because budworms have become resistant to them. If left unchecked, the presence of the caterpillars will cause petunias to stop blooming. Hope this helps!

In 2011, and for the first time, nasturtiums that I hung in a pot picked up something black that could have been an aphid. There were so many of them that it would have been difficult to find some not-infested leaf to eat. It was late summer (and at that time I did not know that summer would last until late November) so I just let the bugs have their way. They got very thick as all the weeks passed that I was sure would be the last before frost (which we usually get here in September). As a side note, why is it that everyone (seems to) know that the flowers are edible but seem to not know that the leaves have pretty much the same flavor? I use the leaves constantly in salads and in cooking. So, I have just started a new crop for this year: 4 types from Johnny's Seeds: Peach Melba, Night & Day, Empress of India, Kaleidoscope. I just noticed what looks to be white fly. I put some Sticky Traps from Safer's near the plants. I have some basil that may be affected and I have 9 varieties of tomatoes coming up. It is too cold to move the tomatoes outside and I do not want them infested. So, even though nasturtiums are specifically stated on the label of Safer's Soap as "do not use [soap on nasturtiums]", I took most of them outside, sprayed them with Safer's Soap (and some liquid seaweed), and came here.

Y'all, I hate the heat and it has slowed down the fall garden a lot for sure. I am just so ready to be able to go outside in cooler weather and spend the whole day out there if I want to. The stuff I still have in seed packets in the house isn't going to grow until it is planted, is it? It isn't going to get planted until the soil cools. Our high temps this week have ranged from 101 to 106 and our heat index has been even worse, so the soil sure hasn't cooled down a lot yet and I have only gone outside for very limited times in early morning and in the evening. Hopefully the cold front that should make it this far south late this evening or early tomorrow will give us enough of a cool-down that the soil temps will drop some more and quickly at that. Larry, I have big plans for the fall garden, and even to me, my own list seems too ambitious if I look at it all at once. Luckily, it doesn't all go into the ground all at once or I'd never manage to get it done on time. Due to the nature of the plants, some were planted many weeks ago and some aren't planted yet. I can manage a big garden in lots of small spurts of activity, squeezed into whatever cool hours we have. Lately I just wave at my plants as I walk down to the mail box and back, and I promise I'll stop in and see them when it cools down. All along I intended to keep whatever summer plants were still producing (except for most of the tomato plants since I had so many) and whatever had survived the grasshoppers and blister beetles and I intended for sure to plant October beans, southern peas, summer squash and broccoli. Everything else was "iffy" depending on if it ever rained again. I ordered the seeds, though, so certainly hoped I could use them this fall instead of next spring. Being this far south and often having high temps in the 100s occasionally through the end of September, I never get to put greens in the ground very early so normally the fall garden gets planted in July/August for the warm season stuff and then late August/early September for the cool-season stuff, and often I don't get the fall greens into the ground until early October. So far, that's about the same planting track I am on right now, except I'd hoped all summer for an early cool-down so I could be ahead of my own planting schedule for once. That didn't happen. For whatever reason, the grasshoppers are still munching away on the plants that remain from spring and summer, and especially on the tomato plants (the blister beetles are helping them eat tomato plants) but haven't touched the fall plantings of southern peas and green beans. That sort of adds to my feeling that insects are more prone to attack stressed plants and leave healthier plants alone. It isn't that the heat isn't stressing the beans and southern peas, but just that they are younger, healthier and better able to handle the stress. I did keep row covers on them for a while, but the row covers have been off the southern peas for a couple of weeks now and off the green beans beginning about 3 or 4 days ago. So far, nothing has nibbled on them. The 3+" of rain that fell a couple of weeks ago saved my fall garden plans. For a while there, after I planted the southern peas and green beans, I thought that might be all I'd do for fall. Then the rain came along and perked up both the garden and the gardener, and I added fall cukes and squash, and started seeds in cups of a lot of the cool season stuff that can be grown from transplants, like the kale and lettuce. Now I'm just waiting for the weather to become more cooperative. With cooler temps, I hope to get the root crops seedied into the beds in the next few days, and I do mean "few" because our VFD's annual fundraiser is next week so I'll be spending some time on that as well. I have to wait until the soil temps drop low enough for good germination though, so you can bet I'll be out with the thermometer checking the soil temps daily. Carol, After that 3" of rain fell, our heat index just soared. I would use our own readings from our thermometers and barometer and plug them into the HPC's online Heat Index Calculator. For a few days we had a heat index between 112-116 but it has been lower the last couple of days as the insane heat has sucked up some of that moisture from the ground. I hope you get more rain and if it will cooperate and fall in lower temps then maybe your heat index won't get so high. Kim, I haven't planted salsify this late in years, but since our overall weather pattern is hotter than it used to be, I think it has a good chance. Last winter was so hot that the only really cold spell I remember was the first week in December when it was very cold for the downtown Marietta Christmas parade. We thought that was the beginning of winter, but looking back, that was just about the beginning and the end of winter weather all in the same week. Of course, since I am planting salsify and counting on fairly warm ground through at least the end of December, we'll probably have an early winter and a long, cold one just to make me crazy. That's okay. If fall salsify doesn't work, I'll plant it again in spring. Most of the more ususual seeds I get, I cannot find locally and I order them so I can have the specific varieties I want to grow. All you really can find in the stores here is the same-old-same-old hybrids with a few heirlooms and open-pollinated varieties, and I don't necessarily want to grow the standard varieties. I like a lot of the open-pollinated and heirloom varieties bred with flavor in mind rather than earliness or uniformity or shelf life. With a lot of my fall plantings, I had seeds left from summer, but for the Wild Garden seed mixes and some of the kale and root crops, I ordered from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and Bountiful Gardens. The "Wild Garden" mixes are not actually wild plants, they are just mixes of anything/everything from the breeding program at Wild Garden Farms. A few things I choose are season-specific. For example, for Spinach I choose some varieties that do better in fall and winter than in spring. In spring, we often go from 'too cold' to 'too hot' in about two days and sometimes spinach doesn't get to gtow for very long before the heat sets in, so I choose varieties that make smaller plants that mature faster. With a long, mild autumn I can grow some varieties of spinach that get larger, but which also have later DTMS and would likely be hit too hard by the spring heat. Sometimes it is a very subtle difference but it does matter. Winter Bloomsdale Spinach withstands cold and winter moisture a little differently than Bloomsdale Longstanding, which is why I choose it for fall, for example. Last year I planted a forage mixture for the deer and rabbits since there were so few native plants alive after the long hot summer and the wildlife was so starved, and it included turnips and collards that never froze all winter long, so this year I thought I'd plant more of them for us. It is not a bad wildfire year at my end of the state, and that is what determines how much of a fall garden I have most years. If the fires are bad in late summer and fall, I am too busy to plant a fall garden. Since the fires here haven't been too bad since late July, I have time for a fall garden. I just try to work with whatever the weather and real life allow me to do. Our "normal" wildfire season actually is in the winter months, but not much has been normal the last couple of yeas. Back in June and July when I was canning like a maniac, every day I hoped I could have just "one more day" without fires so I could get a bit more canning done. It used to be the fires only interfered with spring planting time, but lately they are a problem at different points year-round. Last summer, between the drought and the almost-daily wildfires I didn't can anything all summer long. This year, I canned day after day after day. I'm hoping for a quiet autumn, fire-wise, so I can work in the fall garden day after day in the same way. Ezzirah, I think it was wise to choose cool-season stuff. Now, if only the cool weather will arrive and cooperate with us. After suffering through these last two hot summers, I am determined to have a good fall garden. Having to hang out so much inside to avoid the heat all summer long for two summers has driven me crazy, because I'd much rather be in the garden. I've mostly dabbled in fall gardening in the past without getting overly serious about it, and a lot of that has been because of us being busy with fire department stuff in the fall, but there's been some major schedule changes to routine fall VFD fundraisers and community activities, so I ought to have more time free for the fall garden. Yay! I'd be remiss if I didn't add this last part for anyone considering a fall garden. Without a way to protect your plantings from wildlife, you have to share the plantings with them. Because I am surrounded by plentiful wildlife, my big garden has an 8' tall garden fence around it. Without that fence, I wouldn't even attempt a fall and winter garden because the wild animals would get it all. Even now, I have deer that come and nibble anything that I grow on the fence, but I don't mild sharing that little bit with them since they can't reach anything else, and they are hungry too. Dawn