Here in Minneapolis, we are getting into the 80's nearly every day now. My sweet banana and Anaheim peppers have been bearing for some weeks and now the Cubanelles are starting to set, and I am getting all kinds of tomatoes daily off my two 4th of July plants. No squirrel problem this year for some reason. I have to admit to not having felt the need to install the window air conditioner this year, though. I have seen hotter summers, and some of my sweet potatoes aren't vining all that well, but then they didn't last year either. Just OHenry is running well. Vardeman and Jewel are not so vigorous as I would have hoped, but then there may be close to two months, at least a month and a half, before we get a freeze, too. Peppers don't get much more reliable than the Sweet bananas and the Anaheims; so if you are having problems getting fruits on your peppers consider them. They are the main types I plant anymore. Yesterday I planted onion seeds (Copra) for sets (an experiment), all kinds of coles including both leafy types and winter radishes and turnips, lettuce, and carrots. I may just move some tiger lily bulbils today and I am watching daylily seed pods which should ripen here very soon. I have never had any luck with the daylily seeds but one of these times I am going to get it right. I get volunteers; so somehow I just haven't found the knack yet. A while back in the garlic bed I harvested first, I planted some Minnesota midget muskmelons and the little squirts are blooming already. Very soon now I will start to work up beds for this fall's garlic, potato onion and tulip plantings. I think I will also give the elephants one more chance. I am going over to Core and away from peat moss this year. I don't can or freeze, since I do not have a big enough garden for that and a bit of everything else I would like to try. So now that garlic has been taken up, it is back to planting. :) BTW I especially like things I can snack on while working in the garden. Some days those snacks will be my whole set of meals. I use as few pesticides as possible; so a light washing with the wand is usually enough.

I planted a bunch of bush beans in the places that I pulled my lettuce and spinach. I did this last year and it worked well. As an experiment, I put in some swiss chard, because the package said it could be planted in July. The other posters here seem to plant that in the early spring, so I may be way off base with that one. I'll post a follow up later and let you know how that goes. I have never grown it before. I planted about a week ago and I am going to need to thin soon, because it germinated right away.

Check with your state's Extension Service. Each county has it's own Cooperative Extension Office which provides free publications and information for the asking. They will also have variety recommendations which have been trialed in your state. The following two images are excerpts from the Vegetable Planting and Planning Calendar for Missouri complete with spring and fall planting dates, how much to plant per person, etc. Just call up the office in your county. Look under the "Government" section of your phone book under "Extension". They will also have valuable vegetable/gardening tables available specifically for your area. Violet

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