Thank you very much, Dawn! I assume you're getting your cool season list made up as well? Also, where do you usually purchase your hot pepper seeds from? This post was edited by Dulahey on Mon, Jan 13, 14 at 15:22

Charles, Yes, I plant them all in mid-winter through spring. When I lived in Fort Worth, some of these were fall plants only for me because Fort Worth warmed up and got too hot too early. Up here, usually the cold nights linger a bit later most years than they did down there and I can get good crops from most cool-season crops on this list most springs. The last two years we have warmed up too early in spring for some of them though. It is really hard for me to get good spring harvests from cauliflower or brussels sprouts in spring, so I plant them only for a fall harvest. I also have trouble with salsify and a few other odd things that need a long cool season. They do better in fall than spring, but I don't grow them much any more in either spring or fall. Up here in southcentral OK (I am just across the river from Gainesville, TX), the key is to plant a lot of them extra early (earlier than OSU recommends) and cover them up with floating row cover that offers some freeze and frost protection. I have floating row cover in several weights, and the heaviest one gives 8 degrees of frost protection. I have found if I cover up the plants with a double layer of row cover, it often will give the plants 12 or more degrees of frost protection. Using floating row cover changed my gardening life because it allows me to plant early and not lose the plants to cold weather. I also often lay down black plastic on top of the cool-season crop beds to warm up the soil while the air temps are still pretty cool. The warm soil can help cool-season seeds germinate more quickly than if I was trying to germinate them in cold soil. To have a good few months with cool-season plants, I really have to push the limits here in terms of planting early, but I figure I have nothing to lose by trying. The nice thing is that if we heat up too early and the cool-season crops fail to produce well (or at all), I know I'll have another chance with the fall garden. That happened last year with snap peas and broccoli. I had a wonderful fall harvest of broccoli, but still didn't get any snap peas. As it turned out, the grasshoppers, which exist in huge numbers in our rural area most years, loved the sugar snap peas so much they ate the plants down to the ground. For a while the peas tried valiantly to regrow, but after being eaten repeatedly, they gave up. I even had them under floating row cover, but the hoppers ate their way through it too. That's never happened before. Maybe I'll have sugar snap peas this spring if the weather cooperates. It also helps that I have a lot of space. When the garden was smaller, I pretty much had to choose between cool-season and warm-season crops in spring because there wasn't room for everything. We enlarged the garden every year until it reached its present size, so now I can grow pretty much whatever I want whenever I want. That helps. My favorite gardening magazine is "Texas Gardener", by the way, and if you've never seen it, you might want to check it out. I find it just as useful for me here in OK as I did when I lived in TX. You wouldn't believe how many great varieties for our part of the country I've found merely by reading about them in Texas Gardener. Two of the five gardening books I'm reading this winter are from Texas too---Dr. Bill Adams' book on Growing Tomatoes and Greg Grant's Vegetable and Fruit book. Dawn

Rebecca, Lettuce transplants very easily. To ensure I have no problems, I always start the seedlings in paper cups I can plant (I use the tiny Dixie cups sold to go in bathroom cup dispensers) or in peat pellets. That way, no matter the age of the plants, I can transplant them with no real root disturbance. Lettuce seedlings generally need more light that the light shelf can get them and will get leggy fast, so as soon as the first tiny sprouts appear, I move them outdoors. I can carry then indoors, if needed, but since they're pretty cold-tolerant, I really don't need to carry them in very much if at all. Mary, Sow the seed slightly later than OSU recommends and you'll be fine. Carrot seed is slow to germinate in cold soils, but much quicker in warmer soils so the trade-off when planting later is minimal. It can take carrot seeds up to 30 days to germinate in cool soils but significantly less in warm soils, so you can get seedlings up before the end of March from a mid-March sowing or you can get seedlings up before the end of March from an early-March sowing. The difference is that the extended amount of time the seeds spend in cool soil between early and late March increases the chance something will happen to the seeds. Honestly, carrots are fairly easy if you sow them when the soil is a bit warmer. Look at how easily the closely related Queen Ann's Lace self-sows itself around by the hundreds and thousands of plants everywhere every year. Kim, I occasionally have harvested carrots even later than that---well into July in one year without an appreciable loss in quality, but it must have been a fairly wet, cool summer. Dawn

Jack, Your list is nice and be careful or you'll fall into my trap of planting more garden than you can maintain/defend against wildlife and pests. Believe me, cutting this grow list is absolutely, positively the hardest thing I've ever done garden-wise. I am not exaggerating when I say how very painful it was and is. It has caused tossing and turning and sleepless nights, lying awake wondering how I will "survive" without 50 varieties of tomatoes, remembering the great experimental years when I grew 300 tomato varieties (600 plants) in one year in an effort to see how they did in head-to-head competition. (This was only possible because deer hadn't found our garden yet as many of these plants were outside the fenced garden itself. It also was, ironically, the year the deer found the garden, naturally, and started eating tomato plants.) Ever since we moved here, my gardening motto has kinda been "go big or go home". However, there's just the two of us now and we can eat only so much produce. Of course a person always can give away the excess, but if you raise lots of excess produce, you even put lots of time into growing, harvesting it, washing it, sorting it and bagging it up just to give away. I want to spend that time more productively on projects here at home. Even when I can, freeze and dehydrate all the excess for us, all I'm doing is filling up pantries and freezers with more food than we can eat. If you keep preserving more food than you can eat every year, after a while you have quite a surplus in storage. I work hard to rotate the oldest stored canned and frozen goods so that the oldest stuff is eaten first and the newest stuff last, but that's also a ton of work that involves keeping the deep freezes (we have 3 of them) really, really well-organized. I've been working really hard the last few years to more closely align what we preserve with how much we eat, though I still like to preserve two years of food each year---so if there is a total garden failure in any give year (it's never happened, but you never know) then there's still a year's worth of yummy home-grown food stored away. So, it is time to cut back even more. I have to have the mindset that what I grow and preserve this year will be enough for us, but not too much, and I cannot focus on the stuff I'm not able to grow. That opens up the door to have more space for flowers. I used to grow a lot more flowers than I have in recent years, but the veggies kept pushing them out. This year, it is a return to many more flowers. True pumpkins have zero chance of surviving here with all the squash vine borers---we always have two generations of them and sometimes 3 or 4. I'm just so tired of fighting them. I'm thinking that if I take off a year or two, maybe the SVBs will die out in my neighborhood. Before they found us, I grew 15-30 varieties of true pumpkins every year and had such a wonderful time doing it (and not even in the real garden, but out in the 10' wide strip of grass between our driveway and the southern property line....with me having to go drag wayward vines out of the driveway occasionally and direct their growth back towards the fenceline), but then the SVBs arrived, and everything changed. I think the SVBs didn't find us until our 7th year here. I do not know a single person in my county who grows true pumpkins (or summer squash) organically without the use of synthetic pesticides. I suppose I could just make life easy on myself by planting those true pumpkins and summer squash in their own garden away from the other two gardens and then spray them regularly with synthetic pesticides, and we'd have a great non-organic harvest of them, right? But, I find it nearly impossible to even contemplate doing that. I'd rather not ever use a synthetic pesticide even if it means giving up pumpkins. Oh, and my whole no-pumpkin plan is somewhat in danger because Lillie mentioned she loves pumpkins and have I ever grown the blue ones? I told her yes and the pink ones too, so of course, she's hoping I'll find a place to grow them. I need to have my head examined for even discussing pumpkins with that sweet child. I'm toying with the ideal of building a high tunnel, maybe 10' x 12', back in the back garden and covering it with Biothrips Proteknetting instead of plastic, and planting blue and pink pumpkins inside it for Lillie but I'm not going to tell her about that idea until the high tunnel gets built (if it gets built). Even then, we still have the vole issue so could go to all the trouble to try to exclude squash pest and still have voles eat the plant roots and kill the plants. We couldn't grow many pumpkins in a space that small, but for her, even 1 or 2 plants of the blue and the pink would be better than nothing. Sweet potatoes? I know I don't have them on my list. Every now and then I skip growing them because of space issues. What usually happens when I 'think' I am skipping them for one year is that I walk into Mike's Garden Center one day in May and see the 4 or 6 or 8 varieties of slips that they have, and then I impulsively buy some slips and find a way to shoehorn them into the garden. Last year I grew them in a regular bed, not one lined with hardware cloth, and I got away with it and the voles didn't eat them. That's a rarity. Maybe I'll find a spot to try that again this year because my hardware-cloth lined beds already will have taters, carrots and other things in them. The problem with all root crops is that we have billions, possibly trillions of pine voles living in our woodland. Usually they stay there until it gets hot and dry and food starts getting scarce--so generally early July. When that happens, they flock to the garden and eat every living thing that has some sort of fleshy tuber or root underground (or at/slightly above grade level)---sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, onions, leeks, the bulbing form of fennel, carrots, radishes, turnips, beets, tulips (but not daffodils), dahlias, lilies, daylilies, ornmental sweet potatoes and virtually every other flower that has any sort of bulb or tuber for a root except I don't remember them ever eating glads. After they devour all that stuff, they start in on the root systems of fruit trees (and sometimes non-fruiting trees) and black berries. Still hungry? They start eating the roots of cucumbers, southern peas, watermelons and pumpkins. Honestly, sometimes it is a wonder that we are able to grow anything at all and get a harvest before the voles kill the plants. Other years the voles stay out of the garden. You never know what kind of year it is going to be. I have three small raised beds completely lined in hardware cloth where I can grow root crops, but there's never enough room in those beds for everything---so it means I have to make hard choices. This year I choose carrots over sweet potatoes, but there's always a chance that I'll be able to squeeze in a late sweet potato planting to succeed the carrots. So, cool-season root crops usually get to mature before voles show up but I plant them in hardware cloth-lined beds because some years the voles show up at planting time (maybe in a hard winter?) and eat all the seed potatoes as soon as I plant them if they aren't in the hardware cloth-lined bed. Warm-season root crops have a lot more vole trouble because the voles get hungrier in the summer once the heat decimates their usual food supply. In the worst drought years, the voles even have devoured the roots of lantana, moss rose and zinnias. They also love herbs, especially (for whatever reason) lemon balm. They've never bothered garlic or asparagus though. And, yes, I've tried all the castor oil based repellents and I think all they do is make the voles reproduce more babies more quickly. I've tried growing a border of castor bean plants along the garden fenceline---from the way some of those seeds 'moved' after they were sown, I think the voles dug up the beans I had planted and carried them around and moved them into new spots before they sprouted----and we still had voles destroy the garden plants anyway. If I were starting over with a brand new garden here, knowing what I know now about the voles, and if money were no object, I would have poured gravel 6" deep (or even poured concrete) over the entire garden plot, and then built raised beds on top of the gravel/concrete with each and every bed fully lined in hardware cloth. The problem with hardware cloth is that eventually it rusts and corrodes and needs to be replaced when it is used underground in the garden. I'm dreading the day when that happens to just the three small beds lined with it because it will involve moving a ton of dirt to replace the hardware cloth and we're getting older and less fond of heavy digging every year. And, yes, the voles do tunnel through the gravel driveway sometimes, just to show me they can, but I still think a gravel-based garden would have less vole trouble. So, root crops are limited by necessity. The kinds of flowers, fruit and berries I grow are limited by whatever the voles' appetites are in any given year. I'll never plant a fruit tree again without burying a hardware cloth root cage around the root system to at least give the tree a chance to make enough roots to survive the voles in its early years. I believe the voles are one reason we have so many snakes come into the garden. The cats control field mice and rats pretty well. Pumpkin does his best to control the voles, but there's so many of them that he gets tired of playing with them and gives up by mid-summer. The older cats just ignore the voles with a "been there, done that" attitude. Bobcats got into the garden almost daily and controlled the voles (though at the time, I did not realize that's why they were there because the voles hadn't become a garden problem yet since the bobcats were controlling them) when the garden had only a 4' tall fence. When we raised the fence to 8' to exclude the deer, it also excluded the bobcats. So, my choice appears to be a garden with a 4' fence and no voles and with bobcats but with tons of deer damage, or a garden with an 8' fence, no bobcats and no deer damage, but tons of vole damage. What's a gardener to do? So, those are the challenges I face, and that's the reason certain veggies (and many kinds of flowers) fall off the grow list. I love where we live. I expected wildlife. I might not have expected as much wildlife as we have though. With the Red River to our west, south and east, and tons of Wildlife Management Land along the river, we have such huge numbers of wildlife that sometimes it can be mind-boggling. In drought years it almost becomes dangerous here as the wildlife gets hungry and more aggressive---you do not, for example, want to encounter a bunch of hungry feral hogs ever. Even the deer have stalked me at times because they are hungry, and sometimes they will stand outside the garden fence and blow air through their nostrils trying to scare me out of the garden, or will stand outside the fence, stare at me and stomp their feet trying to scare me out of my own garden. I always, always, always must be mindful to close the garden gate behind me when I enter the garden and to securely latch the gate closed----it isn't fun to have even a little skunk come wandering into the fenced garden while you're in there...and that is why my garden has two gates! Truthfully, when the deer are that aggressive, I'd rather go into the house, but that means leaving the safety of the enclosed garden and walking about 100' in an open area with the deer right there....so I yell back at the deer, tell them to go away, throw things at them, etc. and after they leave, I go indoors. We won't even get into talk of the cougar year when the sudden appearance of cougars at my garden gate in mid- to late- summer caused me to start carrying a long gun instead of just a hand gun out to the garden with me....and for weeks I was so scared that I hardly went into the garden for any reason except to harvest and then I'd take two big dogs with me. Big dogs trample gardens, so I was sort of choosing the lesser of two evils at that point. Personally, I'm more in favor of gun-free gardening, but not willing to move back to the city to make it a reality. : ) As more people move here to our rural area slowly over the years (near us, but usually not between us and the river), it just seems to push more wildlife towards us, especially if they clearcut the woodland areas on their property. More wildlife is just more trouble for me and my garden. If I ever build a new garden spot, we will either build a deck of pressure-treated lumber or pour a huge concrete slab and then I'll have an Earthbox garden right outside the back door with a hard surface beneath it that might keep the garden vole-free and snake-free. That's my dream retirement garden, but we'd have to fence the side yard to make it happen....and Tim hates fencing. Still, I expect I'll get my way and have this retirement garden built after he retires in a few more years. Okay, my rant about what I can and can't do is over. Everything I've learned I cannot do here because of the wildlife absolutely was learned the hard way by having wildlife destroy what I planted over and over again, so I've learned to focus instead on what I can do. That means that some root crops don't make the list in any given year and many forms of flowers that have tuberous or bulbous roots are off the grow list permanently. Some years I get so tired of fighting squash bugs even on regular squash and C. moschata types of winter squash that I swear I am never, ever again going to plant squash but then I plant it anyway. One of these days, I'll skip all squash for a year and y'all will think I've completely lost my mind. It's okay. I don't expect anyone who has never had these sorts of garden challenges to understand that a gardener can only fight that war so many times on so many fronts before they decide that gardening shouldn't be a war and just give up on that particular crop. Dawn