I garden in downtown Atlanta, my garden acts easily as a zone 8 garden and it is BLAZING HOT, no shade, facing south and east. Everything does just dandy for me! Prepare soil well so it retains water, mulch very well and water when needed. I actually don't water all that frequently and everything is fine. Cowpeas, yard long beans, bush beans, lima beans, okra, malabar spinach, butternut squash, luffa, sweet and hot peppers, eggplants, various melons and tomatoes all do fine. I grow Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, sungold, green zebra, Juliette, Taxi, Jubilee, Rutgers, Marlglobe, and many more different tomatoes but these are the ones I grow pretty much every year. Most of the heirlooms I vary simply to try new tastes every year. Tip: Grow sweet peppers in the shade of tomatoes. A local farmer taught me this and it works like a charm. I've increased my pepper harvests greatly and never get any burn. Insects and disease are more challenging than that heat.

Well then we stubborn granite girls will just have to stick together...or knock heads. :-) I've found that if you can protect that first 6 to 8" of growth on beans, the rabbits will then leave them alone. So...a temporary buffer of some sort (chicken wire tunnel, motion activated water sprinkler, a line of carnivore/omnivore hair [hey I have shelties, they shed; and I've heard of people getting hair clippings from the local salon], pinecones, short upright sticks as pickets) can baby the new beans until they're tall enough/tough enough to not be interesting for the bunnies. Bunnies graze off the tender stuff, once the growing tip gets past their nibble height they generally look for other things to eat. I leave a patch of clover going to distract them. It usually works but last year's drought had the grass at a non-growth period and so the danged rabbits attacked my garden and ate all the beans to the dirt; every stem, every leaf. Squirrels (including boomers) like to eat the fruit off the plants...so they will grab the tomatoes and eat one bite and drop them, pick the peas, etc. And no fence will stop them. Cats help, but then they poo in your garden. This year we hope to fence the entire backyard with a short fence at the garden so that our shelties can run the yard. I'm hoping to scare the crap out of the moles, voles, bunnies and boomers by having an intermittent and unpredictable dog patrol.

Thanks for the trades and the help in our community garden. To ymaddox, Charlie60, NancyPlants, FarnerGreg, mrs.b_in_wy your seeds will be on their way today, roper2008 return postage is headed your way. God bless you all! We STILL have some trades available and STILL need more help. It takes a lot to plant 1� acres and a good variety of veggies. Be sure to check out our initial post and if you have a surplus of seed and would like to trade or can send for SASBE to help the community outreach, please take a moment and respond. We will start our Greenhouse efforts at the end of February/first of March time frame and plan our community garden�s planting locations to ensure good rotation efforts�.just gotta know what we will have available to plan properly. Thanks in advance, ~Arkseven

If you live somewhere with freaky weather it is always best to sow a few seeds and then sow some two weeks to one month later to act as back up plants should the first batch not survive. Its all about timing. If they stay in their pots too long, some plants just never do as well in the garden as those that got outside and in the ground at the perfect time. You'll never be able to forecast that "perfect" time so just take the risks you're comfortable with. Hot weather lovers like morning glories and zinnias do not do any better starting them early. They just kinda sit still until things warm up so there isn't a huge advantage to starting them early. They will set seed which will over winter and sprout next year but the zinnia seedlings won't show up until summer is half over and the morning glories will show up where you don't want them and also a bit late. Two things will slow down seedlings - lack of sunlight (much stronger than indoor lighting) and lack of warmth. It is better the keep them starved for light while you wait for things to warm up outside. Cool temps bring with them all sorts of rot problems with seedlings. If you're starting large seeds of things like melons or cucumbers just stick two or three seeds in each space and then use scissors to chop off the heads of the weakest plants after they're a week or so old. No need to risk damaging roots by digging them up to thin them. The headless ones will sink back into the soil over time. The truth about roots - the roots you see when you dig up a plant are not the parts of the roots that do the actual work of drawing in water and nutrients from the soil. The real workers as far as roots go are microscopic. Only superman can see them with the naked eye (and he ain't much of a gardener!). You can gauge a plants health by looking at its roots but the damage that is done by handling baby plants is to the microscopic roots. Some plants just freak out when those roots are damaged.