I put some soil around my tomato plants just because my lasagna layers are not well mixed/even (hubby went a bit gonzo with bags of leaves in some places) and I wanted to give them a solid area to grow in initially. Also, many people say not to use pure compost for growing, to add a little soil or minerals or what have you, so that is a way to mix in a little real soil in a way that is sure to be accessible to the plants. In my other lasagna beds I never did that, although I usually spread a very thin layer of soil or finished compost on top. This one is so huge I hadn't gotten around to that step yet. Marcia

Not really, simply because most veggies like warm weather, so you sow things like cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes near the end of winter just as the last frosts are coming few and far between. For me, that's late March, should be the same for you. For cold season veggies, I planted out cabbage on Feb 8 that was wintersown 2 weeks earlier. It was too late. They never really took off, probably because they were so small when I planted them. By April, I had pulled them out since there still wasn't a head forming. This year, I plan to sow in just a couple weeks in the hoophouse and let them grow on a bit before planting them out in the garden. Just seems to make sense to me. I'll be sowing snow peas in early February. I think I have some lettuce, which was also sown at the same time as the cabbage. I did manage to harvest a few times from that before the heat zapped it. I will still direct sow my warm weather veggies and start tomatoes inside under lights. I'll wintersow others when those get planted out, so I can have more plants and more harvests through the season. I'm hoping to grow about 32 tomato plants this year from seed, about 18 varieties.

Most of my fall garden has already been sown--spinach, lettuce, mache, 2 weeks ago. Sowed some cilantro at that time as well, as I never seem to have it when I want it during the summer (due to bolting). Snap peas were sown beginning of August and are blossoming now. I think sowing them now would certainly be pushing it as far as getting any harvest before the weather turns cold. Same with carrots--they need even more time. I sowed mine end of July. I just got my first harvest of "fall" bush beans, also planted in July. I still have some containers to sow for inside the greenhouse of lettuce and other cold-hardy greens. Has anyone else noticed the chill in the mornings?

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