We're in Poughkeepsie, and we just started 2 trays of assorted veggies and herbs, including tomatoes, peppers, yarrow, and parsley. With an indoor lighting and bottom heating setup, our first seeds germinated in 3 days, and after 6 days we're already seeing some 2 inch seedlings. The lighting and heat projects were done very cheaply! If you're interested, details are on our brand spanking new blog about our experiences gardening in the Hudson Valley: http://naseersiddique.com/greenthumbgeeks Even though a foot of snow fell in the last 24 hours, it's Spring in our grow room (dining room)!

tom, you growing those onions and radishes in containers or in the ground? Onions for sure go in the ground, they take up too much real estate to put in containers so they'll go in the raised boxes they were in last year, between the bananas. The radishes will probably go on the edge of the onion boxes just like last year so I can grow the lettuces in my window box planters on the upper deck. I'd like to plant onion bulbs but have not seen them anywhere. Any idea where to find them? You should start seeing onion sets (60) at the Big Box stores any time now.... Tom, did you say this is a good time to plant zucchinis? And do they climb or trail? Yes, you can grow them now. The bush types trail. We've been experimenting with the English vining marrows since last fall, hard to find seeds but Silvia did well this past year and has been able to share seeds with those who have ask for them. Since it went so well with the Table Dainty, and we can no longer get seed from England, I though I'd better get some of the Trailing Green Marrow in case the source for it dried up. I have enough seeds of it right now to send anyone who wants to try it six seeds each. These are vining squash, just as Silvia's picture shows.... I'll post pictures later if my humidity and morning dew don't do these plants in with DM/PM. I currently have three of each started on my veggie arbor. hey, i rather liked the cuccuzi! Good Michael, I've got seeds to send you ;-) I am happy to inform you that ALL the GOURDS went to a nice home. To a friend that really, really likes them! Silvia, give me their address, I'm looking for a sucker, er, I mean a loving home for mine :-)

Carol, I think Rocky Ford Green Flesh is a really good one, and I might still have some seed for it in my seed box. Let me look for it today or tomorrow after the heat has driven me inside from the garden (and since it is already 79 degrees and the sun isn't even up yet, I bet the heat drives me in pretty quickly). I'll be happy to send you some seed of that one if I still have any, and I might have some other melon seeds. I have to look....my memory isn't what it used to be and I haven't bought any melon seed in a couple of years, so I don't remember what all I have. Broccoli seed is remarkably good at germinating, isn't it? I grew twice as many plants as I really intended to this spring just because all the seed germinated and I didn't want to waste the plants.....and I have a lot of broccoli in the freezer as a reward for having 'too many' plants. I have been putting in stuff for fall, but it is slow going with all this heat and wind. The heat alone would be bad enough, but the wind we've had just compounds the damage. Some of my youngest tomato plants at the eastern edge of the garden have taken a real beating from the wind the last two days and may not survive. The older plants have taken such a beating that I may yank out a lot of them. Some of them were marginal to carry over to fall and the wind may have made up my mind about going ahead and removing them. I am about to reach the "sick of tomatoes" phase anyway (not sick of eating them, but tired of picking, washing, sorting and processing, LOL) so it won't bother me tremendously to pull out a few old, tired plants....and I have plenty of others anyway. So far in the ground, I have fall cantaloupe/muskmelons, sweet corn, 3 kinds of green beans, winter squash, small pumpkins (small sugar pie and also Jack-B-Little for fall decorations) black-eyed peas, a lot of cucumbers for pickle-making, tomatoes, and then the okra, pepper and tomato plants I'm carrying over from spring. Still to go into the ground are all the cool-season crops, and most of them are seeded and growing in cups, except for carrots which I need to direct seed soon. I don't know if the winter squash or pumpkins will have time to mature before a frost but will just hope for the best. Most years they do, and fall gardening is sort of risky anyway, in terms of an early frost coming and ruining things. I need to collect more floating row covers and frost blankets because I don't have that many. In recent years, we've tended to have our first early freezing night in mid-October, although it isn't always necessarily a real hard killing freeze....that tends to come about a month later. Our average first freeze is Nov., but the weather does as it will no matter what the averages say! The summer-planted tomato plants do tend to stay small through about the end of August even though they look healthy and are blooming/setting fruit. My tallest fall tomato plants so far are (not surprisingly) the cherry types and they are about 20-24" tall. The others range from about 10-20" tall and they look fine, but short. The fall plants normally grow like crazy in September just as soon as the worst of the August heat breaks. I am excited about the fall garden, but would be more excited if it would rain or if we'd get some heat relief. We've had less than an inch of rain this month and with temps in the upper 90s and heat index numbers in the low 100s, I've just "had it" with summer and am so ready for fall. To make matters worse, the snakes are up and moving around during the day, which is abnormal in this heat, so I assume they are getting short of food. My white cat with black spots, appropriately named Spots, was bitten by a copperhead yesterday afternoon. She ought to be dead by now as this is her fourth copperhead bite, and the vet said the second one usually kills a cat that has survived one bite already. Her paw is swollen up huge and she is very cranky, but she survived the night and still has an appetite, so I think she'll survive this snakebite as well. She is our second cat named "Spots" and she replaced a "Spots" who died after HER second snakebite. I hate snakes. Now that we've had a copperhead out in broad daylight, I'll be jumpy (I prefer to think of it as being 'extra-cautious') for the next few days. Until yesterday, we hadn't had a snake seen in the yard in several weeks so I was considering it a pretty good summer. If I can make my way through a mound of peppers and tomatoes sitting in the kitchen today...I am thinking of canning the green jalapenos, and roasting the red ones to make chipotles, and dehydrating the small tomatoes and saucing the big ones, then I may find myself 'caught up' with putting food up for winter and have a few days off. All I can say is that it is about time. Dawn

The only vegetable planted now that might make a crop is radishes. Pinetree seeds (superseeds.com) has a variety of radish seeds, and they ship now. Personally, I'd put in a cover crop or a mulch of manured hay and/or compost, and renew the soil. The loss in producing now will be made up later. We're near you, about 20 miles south of Waco, and although we have spinach and lettuce and sugar snap peas being harvested now, they were planted in late Oct. or early Nov. We just had our first hard freeze, so the tender vegetable plants are going to the compost pile. A neighbor is bringing a load of well rotted manure to spread on the garden this week.