I've been gardening in north Florida for 30 years. You will find that lots of things will survive over the winter here but they will just poke along until February if started now. Collards (Georgia Collards are my favorite) should really be transplanted by early to mid September to get a really good winter crop. I would try transplants now and give them lots of fertilizer and keep them well watered to urge them on. They will grow during the cool weather and short days of winter but not very fast. The same goes for lettuce. You can still get a good crop of radishes if you plant now. You can plant carrot seed, mustard (Tendergreen for mild flavor, Giant Red for spicy), Red Russian Kale, and Detroit Dark Red Beets. They won't do much until late January or early Feburary but then they will grow like gangbusters. Broccoli is iffy over the winter as a really hard freeze in the low 20's will kill most varieties. Some years you get lucky with fall planted broccoli but most years we have killing freezes. I usually set broccoli transplants out in mid February and cover them with straw if a hard freeze threatens. Green Sprouting is my favorite for flavor and it stands the spring heat well. Start your transplants under plain old fluorescent shop lights the first week in January and set them out in February as soon as the weather seems to be warming. And be sure to try Eclipse Green Peas. They are wonderful for this area started in early spring. Plant them at the same time you set out your broccoli. They take less cold than other varieties and more heat and are very sweet. When other peas have become bitter due to spring heat, these are still sweet and delicious. My best pea. Last year they were available from Vermont Bean Seed Company. Sugar Snap peas also do well in warmer weather. Most farm stores sell seeds for far less money than catalogs and as a beginning gardener you may want to start there. The varieties are limited but you can get a huge amount of seed to play with for just a few dollars. Make sure to plant your collards at least 2 feet apart in all directions as the plants will eventually get pretty large. Lettuce plants can usually go a foot apart, and beets and carrots can be planted about 6 inches apart. In the winter I plant my tallest plants to the north and the shortest to the south to take advantage of the winter sun. I fertilize with chicken manure from my chicken pens and mulch with oat straw. Years ago, before I knew better, I mulched a garden with hay (bermuda) and ended up with a pasture when the seeds in the hay sprouted. Don't let anyone tell you that bermuda hay is a hybrid and the seeds won't sprout. As much as I hate to admit it, I had to use Round Up to get rid of all the bermuda grass. I always garden organically but I couldn't get rid of it any other way. Every little piece of root left in the ground sprouts. Good luck and just enjoy your garden. The only way to learn to garden is to experiment and that's part of the fun!

Shelley, I think a lot of the raised bed/sunken bed issue in our climate comes down to what sort of soil you have. If you have very sandy soil that drains very quickly, you have to add huge amounts of compost and other organic matter that will improve the soil's ability to hold on to the moisture if you build raised beds. Since raised beds do drain more quickly and also heat up more quickly, there is a balancing act involved where you have to try to ensure that they drain well during the rainier parts of the year and yet also retain moisture well enough during the hottest parts of the year. If you have dense, clay soil (like most of the soil in which I garden), while you still have to add a lot of organic matter in order to make it drain well, you also won't have quite as much of an issue with raised beds draining ridiculously fast since clay can hold on to moisture significantly longer than the sandy soil does. Having said that, once the daytime highs are routinely going over 100 degrees, and often even over 110 degrees, none of the soil retains moisture as well as it should, and that is why heavy mulching is a must with raised beds. Otherwise, you cannot even keep the soil moist enough for the plants to grow well and produce well. Some years, even with very heavy mulch and an irrigation system, I cannot keep the plants in raised beds happy enough for them to be productive in the hottest part of the summer. I might be able to keep them happy enough that they look green, but if they are too hot they still will stall during the high heat and not produce much until cooler temperatures and heavier rainfall return in the fall. So, in that situation, you have to decide for yourself if it makes sense financially to keep irrigating a garden that cannot produce in the extreme heat. Most of my raised beds are only 4 to 6 inches above grade level, and that is because of the issues involved with taller beds heating up more. I mulch not only the raised beds quite heavily, but also the pathways that surround them. If someone who doesn't understand my mulching system were to look at my garden in the middle of the summer, they wouldn't even know that we have raised beds at all because the mulch on the pathways is so high that it makes the garden look level, and that makes it look like there aren't any raised beds at all, obviously. The difference, of course, is that the raised beds are filled with enriched clay loam soil under heavy mulch and the pathways are just really heavy mulch, so on the rare occasions that we have heavy rainfall in the summer (which likely last occurred in 2007), the excess water still drains out of the raised beds into the mulched pathways. The pathways can be like little rivers carrying excess moisture downhill and away from the beds in wet periods, but even though the paths can be too wet to walk in during that time, at least the plants in the raised beds survive the heavy rainfall and don't waterlog and die. Keeping the pathways heavily mulched is the key to keeping the soil in the raised beds from heating up too much. If I have raised beds that sit 6" above grade level, that means the boards that hold the soil in the beds are exposed to sunlight and will heat up excessively, leading the soil within those beds to heat up excessively. Unmulched soil often is 20-30 degrees hotter in my garden in the summer months that heavily mulched soil. By putting six inches of mulch in the pathways, though, the boards that surround the beds are practically buried under the mulch themselves, or only the tops of the boards are exposed to direct sunlight but the sides are not, and that helps keep the raised beds from heating up as much as they would if unmulched. If you keep heavy mulch on your raised beds and pathways, you can keep the soil easily 20 degrees cooler than adjacent unmulched soil. I check my soil temperature often (with a thermometer) to ensure I have enough mulch on the soil to keep the soil cool. That's how I learned over the years just how thick to apply the mulch to get the results I need. With crops like potatoes that are sensitive to the high heat, sometimes I pile up grass clippings and hay mulch so high in the pathways In June and early July that you cannot even see the boards that make up the raised beds. That helps keep the potato plants setting and sizing up tubers even in fairly hot temperatures and gives me a couple more weeks of growing time before the air and soil temps get so hot that the plants cease to grow and begin dying back, and that can increase the size of the potato harvest a bit. The downside to using such heavy mulch is that many pests (scorpions, snakes, sow bugs, pill bugs, pine voles, etc.) love that heavy mulch, and since my area is very rural, there are obvious risks inherent in using the heavy mulch. I always have to be very aware of snakes, for example, and this year have had several close calls with timber rattlers which come out of the heavy woods and hang out in and around the yard and garden in the hottest weather. I had so much trouble and so many close calls with timber rattlers this year (it is a miracle that I wasn't bitten on at least two occasions) that there was about a 6 week period late July through early September where I barely stepped foot in the garden at all. In an unmulched garden you can see the snakes a lot more easily than in a heavily mulched one, but with our summertime heat, it is not an option for me to leave the beds or paths unmulched. I consider raised beds a necessity for some crops, but I don't grow everything in raised beds because the exceedingly heavy rainfall that is more common in central, northeastern, eastern and southeastern OK during the growing season is much less common in my part of southcentral OK. I always try to put onions, potatoes, tomatoes and peppers in raised beds, but everything else generally does just fine in grade-level beds. About the only time that excess rainfall is an issue here in our garden is in April through June in the rainy years. My raised beds drain well enough that even in April 2009, when we had slightly under 13" of rainfall in one day, I didn't lose plants due to waterlogged roots, even though subsequent heavy rainfall for about 6 weeks meant that the garden looked more like a pond that a garden. However, they also retain moisture well enough except in the worst of the drought years so that the garden somehow hangs in there and survives July and August of most years. However, I do have to water it. Even after I stopped watering in 2011, and we were having days with the highs around 113-116 with no rain at all for 2 months, a lot of the garden plants survived after I stopped watering and clung to life just enough that when rainfall returned in late August, they were able to regrow and produce a harvest. Even the Piricicaba broccoli survived (at the shady end of the garden) and produced a harvest from October through early or mid-December of that year. Sunken beds potentially could work for some people in some areas of the state, but in order for them to work, the soil would have to drain very well. In a perfect world we'd grow everything in raised beds in spring when rainfall is heavier and in sunken beds in summer when the rainfall is scarce and the heat is so intense, but I don't know how to make a raised bed in May turn into a sunken bed in June. : ) So, I've just learned to put the plants that need good drainage in raised beds, and the rest of the plants in grade-level beds. I wouldn't attempt to garden at all here in the summer without heavy mulch and an irrigation system. I do know people here in my area who don't make any attempt at all to keep the garden green and productive in July and August. At least one of them has a policy of not watering after July 1st at all. He has a great garden from late March or early April through the beginning of July. After July 1st, he doesn't water and just continues to harvest until the combination of heat and lack of rainfall bring an end to his harvest season. That is what works for him. Because I like to have a longer harvest period, I try to keep the garden watered at least through the end of July. If no rain is falling and the heat is brutal, there generally comes a time where I stop watering the garden and just let it survive (or not) on its own. Sometimes I reach that point in mid-June if the spring rains failed to materialize in the amounts needed, but sometimes I water until at least the end of July or even early August. When I do that, the plants may shrivel and wilt and look pathetic, but often they will just barely survive and then will green up, resume growth and produce a harvest in the fall. I just play it by ear every year and adapt my garden practices to whatever weather we are having, because we never know around here if we're going to have 25" of rain (one year we only had 18.75" and it wasn't a good garden year obviously) or 45" or 50" of rain. In a lot of ways, since we have dense clay that drains slowly, the really wet years are more challenging in my garden than the average to really dry years. Bon, I'd have nothing but hugelkultur beds if it wasn't for the venomous snakes that lurk around their edges. But ,(hopefully) most of the people on this forum do not live in very rural land in the bend of the Red River with lots of Wildlife Management Land near them and, therefore, have plentiful wildlife like I have here and maybe in that case the hugelkulture beds wouldn't be so scary. I cannot even turn my compost in the snake season, which runs roughly from April through November, because of the large population of snakes, both venomous and non-venomous, that seem to love hanging out in and around the compost piles. However, I still do add lots of wood directly from the garden, often adding big chunks of half-decayed wood gathered in very cold weather (so the snakes aren't out) from our woodland. I dig the chunks of wood into the ground though, and don't leave it above ground where it would attract snakes. Another issue with any part of our garden that has wood on the surface is that the scorpions love it....so I have to be very careful to never pick up a board or log or anything in the warm season because the scorpions will be on that wood or underneath it and will sting me every time. (This makes my garden sound like it is a combat zone....and sometimes it feels that way! lol) For me, March through June is when the scorpions are the worst in the garden. By the end of June, they retreat more into the adjacent shady woodland which stays more cool and moist than the fenced-in garden areas in full-sun. One more thing, Shelley......when you read online about gardeing, you always have to consider the climate in which the writer gardens. A lot of what is written about gardening is written by people who live in areas where 90 degrees is considered an intense heat wave. Thus, some of what is written just doesn't apply to us and those recommended practices that work for them do not necessarily work as well in our climate where we sometimes have high temperatures over 100 degrees virtually every day for anywhere from 2 or 3 weeks to 2 or 3 months. Before we moved here, if someone would have told me that I'd be trying to garden in high temperatures in the 110-115 degree range some years, I probably would have stayed in Texas, where about the highest temperatures my garden ever had to endure was a rare day when the high might hit 105 or 106. When we had high temperatures in the 111-113 degree range during our very first summer here, my main reaction was 'uh oh'. I was hoping that was a rare occurrence and we wouldn't see temperatures like that very often. Unfortunately, those hot temperatures are a lot more common than I expected them to be. We just have to learn what works best in whatever kind of soil and weather we have here in any given year because the weather can swing wildly from mild to brutal some years, and we have to be able to adapt to quickly changing conditions. In April 2009, we were at the tail end of about a 16-18 month drought and had tremendous wildfires in early through mid-April, followed by incredibly heavy rainfall in late April through June, so the poor garden plants that were baking in hot, dry soil in early April that was almost totally devoid of moisture, suddenly had to endure a couple of months of completely waterlogged soil, high humidity and lots of clouds/very little sunlight. When you plant your garden here in late winter through late spring, you never know what weather challenges you'll be dealing with, so to me it is always a guessing game where I'm trying to figure out in March just what kind of summer weather to prepare for....and some years I guess it right and other years I get surprised. Gardening in Oklahoma is not for sissies (and don't we know it!!!). It can be really challenging to garden in an area where you might have 2" of rain one May and then 16" of rain the next May. You might have 60 to 90 consecutive days with high temperatures over 100 degrees one year, and no days over 100 degrees the next year. Your last killing freeze will be in February some years and in May other years. Your garden may be 20 degrees one day and 80 or 90 degrees the next day. It is the unpredictable nature of the climate here that keeps us on our toes. You never can expect the weather to do the same thing two years in a row because we rarely have that kind of consistency here, and that's part of the challenge of gardening here. I do things really differently in a year when we have 20 or 30" of rainfall than I do them in a year when we have 40 or 50" of rainfall. The problem is that a planting time, you never know what surprises the weather has up its sleeve, so you try to plant for the conditions you think are most likely to occur, and then you hope you 'guessed' right. I have some relatives who garden in an area where 85 degrees is considered a really hot day, and while they face other kinds of challenges in their gardens, they never have the issues we deal with because of our intense summer sunlight and heat. On the other hand, though, they can have trouble getting good yields from crops that demand a long, hot growing season. So, when they tell me it is very hot where they live, I kinda grin to myself because their idea of very hot weather is really different from our idea of really hot weather and, all things being equal, I'd still rather garden here than in a significantly colder climate with a significantly cooler and shorter growing season. Of course, I do think it would be lovely to have a summer where an 85 degree was about as hot as it gets, but we almost never have a summer like that here. Dorothy and I both have mentioned here several times that we remember one summer in fairly recent times where both TX and OK had a cool, wet summer and it was around 1996 or 1997....but we haven't had a nice cool summer like that since then. Dawn

Good Evening/Morning Book junkies, I have not been around for a few days...thought I would check in on the book swap and happenings. Speaking of "Goodwill" and books.....I chuckle (just a little) when I think of a lovely, classy lady who had many books....many, many books. She kept them in boxes around her home. She always said that one day she would donate them. But for the time being they would stay put as she often would read them again. I offered to take them to Goodwill and she would always say no. In fact, she did not want anyone even looking through the boxes of books. Her husband got to the point that he could not stand it anymore....boxes of books everywhere. While his wife was gone one day, he took several of the large boxes of books to Goodwill for donation (yes, without telling her). When his wife returned home, she noticed that many of her beloved boxes of books were no longer "home". She became very upset and I mean very upset!!! She screamed and yelled and ranted and raved and called her husband every name in the book....I know because I was their. She was one pissed off woman. I did not blame her, especially after I heard why she was really so ticked off. Yes, she loved her romantic novels, mysteries, best sellers and biographies. But in her beloved books in so many boxes, she had hidden money to the sweet tune of $15,000. One book had $100, another book had $300, and so on. After she told her husband of the money that HE GAVE AWAY, I think he nearly died. He never touched one of her books again. To this day when I pick up a used book at a garage sale or donation facility, I page though it. You just never know what you might find in a book...a good mystery, lots of tears, laughter, romance and escape or.....a few bucks!!! Let me fetch the closest book. Page 56, sentence 5....... "Many pieces require highly intricate finishing touches and their tiniest details must be treated almost microscopiclly". Off to watch the news! Happy Wednesday! Annie previous 313 + 18 = 331 books

Tire recycling sounds good on the surface, but it's masking the real issues. Although there are no standard definitions for the word recycling, I'd prefer not to use it to describe materials that loose quality and value like tires do when allegedly recycled. Reprocessed would be a more fitting term. You cannot turn a tire in to another tire, instead it is ground up and the remains used for various things like garden mulch or fillers to bulk out other materials. Since these secondary products have minimal, if any ability to be processed again, and the rubber itself was allready hard to reprocess as a tire and is now further degraded, once worn out these items will go straight back in to the non-recyclable waste stream. Here they will cause just as much environmental damage as the original tires would have if they were throw away in the first place. Tire recycling is waste taking the scenic route to the landfill. Further still, this reprocessing of tires makes it more economically viable to make this waste as it now has a value, rather than do something useful like reduce the number of tires being made in the first place. The reason the tire industry is working hard to reprocess tires, or as they call it recycle, is because it helps hide the environmental and financial damage they cause when thrown away. Instead of consumers seeing a tire mountain and reading grim statistics about the number of tires thrown away or the damage they cause each year, they can read a nice eco-friendly statement about how X percent of tires are now recycled and that tires are a nice industy. After all, we're not throwing away millions of tons of tires any more, we're now throwing away loads of garden mulch, fillers and asphalt, which will somehow be conveniantly detached from the tire industry. *POP* in a cloud of magic smoke, marketing and a bit of deception, the offending tires are gone! As for turning tires in to asphalt, aparently it does use a lot more tar to bind the mixture, but it also creates a much stronger longer lasting road surface, plus it's more skid resistant and safer. Long term the safety improvements and savings from not having to replace it as soon would make it the sensible choice, but here in the UK, as in many places, road works are contracted out. Why would a contractor spend more money to install a better surface, only to be rewarded with not being called back as soon to replace it?