Just another little garden project for your DH's list: Low tunnels. You can use them to support neavyweight frost blanket type floating row covers to protect your plantings from late frosts or freezes. You can use them to support lightweight floating row covers to protect something like squash plants from squash vine borers and squash bugs, or bush bean plants from Mexican bean beetles. In the event of a late season snow storm, you could put greenhouse plastic (or any 4 or 6 mm clear plastic from a home center store in a pinch) over your hoops and place frost blanket row cover directly on top of the plants beneath the hoop for two layers of protection. You could add big 5 gallon buckets of water (or WOWs) to young tomato plants as solar collectors if the snow stuck around a few days and you needed to leave plants protected inside your low tunel. That would give your plants three levels of protection. Finally, somebody who had a little bridge, for example, could use hoops to turn it into a covered bridge. And, then, if they wanted, they could train some very long vine to cover the hoops and shade the bridge. I'm just sayin'.......you can do a lot with these things! In my perfect garden that exists only inside my imagination, every raised bed in my garden is covered with a neat, tidy low tunnel. Visit the website of Johnny's Selected Seeds and click on Quickhoops to see what they say about the use of Quickhoops to protect beds. (Or, you can build tidy high tunnels with a larger hoop bender.) Or, visit Eliot Coleman's website. Then, go to the link below to see a place that sells hoopbenders for a lower price than JSS. They have all sorts of examples of low tunnels, high tunnels and greenhouses on their website that were built using the various hoop benders they sell. Carol and I take great delight in throwing out a couple of words to see who's paying attention. : ) Just wait and see what we come up with next! Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Lost Creek's Hoop Benders

Y'all, I hate the heat and it has slowed down the fall garden a lot for sure. I am just so ready to be able to go outside in cooler weather and spend the whole day out there if I want to. The stuff I still have in seed packets in the house isn't going to grow until it is planted, is it? It isn't going to get planted until the soil cools. Our high temps this week have ranged from 101 to 106 and our heat index has been even worse, so the soil sure hasn't cooled down a lot yet and I have only gone outside for very limited times in early morning and in the evening. Hopefully the cold front that should make it this far south late this evening or early tomorrow will give us enough of a cool-down that the soil temps will drop some more and quickly at that. Larry, I have big plans for the fall garden, and even to me, my own list seems too ambitious if I look at it all at once. Luckily, it doesn't all go into the ground all at once or I'd never manage to get it done on time. Due to the nature of the plants, some were planted many weeks ago and some aren't planted yet. I can manage a big garden in lots of small spurts of activity, squeezed into whatever cool hours we have. Lately I just wave at my plants as I walk down to the mail box and back, and I promise I'll stop in and see them when it cools down. All along I intended to keep whatever summer plants were still producing (except for most of the tomato plants since I had so many) and whatever had survived the grasshoppers and blister beetles and I intended for sure to plant October beans, southern peas, summer squash and broccoli. Everything else was "iffy" depending on if it ever rained again. I ordered the seeds, though, so certainly hoped I could use them this fall instead of next spring. Being this far south and often having high temps in the 100s occasionally through the end of September, I never get to put greens in the ground very early so normally the fall garden gets planted in July/August for the warm season stuff and then late August/early September for the cool-season stuff, and often I don't get the fall greens into the ground until early October. So far, that's about the same planting track I am on right now, except I'd hoped all summer for an early cool-down so I could be ahead of my own planting schedule for once. That didn't happen. For whatever reason, the grasshoppers are still munching away on the plants that remain from spring and summer, and especially on the tomato plants (the blister beetles are helping them eat tomato plants) but haven't touched the fall plantings of southern peas and green beans. That sort of adds to my feeling that insects are more prone to attack stressed plants and leave healthier plants alone. It isn't that the heat isn't stressing the beans and southern peas, but just that they are younger, healthier and better able to handle the stress. I did keep row covers on them for a while, but the row covers have been off the southern peas for a couple of weeks now and off the green beans beginning about 3 or 4 days ago. So far, nothing has nibbled on them. The 3+" of rain that fell a couple of weeks ago saved my fall garden plans. For a while there, after I planted the southern peas and green beans, I thought that might be all I'd do for fall. Then the rain came along and perked up both the garden and the gardener, and I added fall cukes and squash, and started seeds in cups of a lot of the cool season stuff that can be grown from transplants, like the kale and lettuce. Now I'm just waiting for the weather to become more cooperative. With cooler temps, I hope to get the root crops seedied into the beds in the next few days, and I do mean "few" because our VFD's annual fundraiser is next week so I'll be spending some time on that as well. I have to wait until the soil temps drop low enough for good germination though, so you can bet I'll be out with the thermometer checking the soil temps daily. Carol, After that 3" of rain fell, our heat index just soared. I would use our own readings from our thermometers and barometer and plug them into the HPC's online Heat Index Calculator. For a few days we had a heat index between 112-116 but it has been lower the last couple of days as the insane heat has sucked up some of that moisture from the ground. I hope you get more rain and if it will cooperate and fall in lower temps then maybe your heat index won't get so high. Kim, I haven't planted salsify this late in years, but since our overall weather pattern is hotter than it used to be, I think it has a good chance. Last winter was so hot that the only really cold spell I remember was the first week in December when it was very cold for the downtown Marietta Christmas parade. We thought that was the beginning of winter, but looking back, that was just about the beginning and the end of winter weather all in the same week. Of course, since I am planting salsify and counting on fairly warm ground through at least the end of December, we'll probably have an early winter and a long, cold one just to make me crazy. That's okay. If fall salsify doesn't work, I'll plant it again in spring. Most of the more ususual seeds I get, I cannot find locally and I order them so I can have the specific varieties I want to grow. All you really can find in the stores here is the same-old-same-old hybrids with a few heirlooms and open-pollinated varieties, and I don't necessarily want to grow the standard varieties. I like a lot of the open-pollinated and heirloom varieties bred with flavor in mind rather than earliness or uniformity or shelf life. With a lot of my fall plantings, I had seeds left from summer, but for the Wild Garden seed mixes and some of the kale and root crops, I ordered from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and Bountiful Gardens. The "Wild Garden" mixes are not actually wild plants, they are just mixes of anything/everything from the breeding program at Wild Garden Farms. A few things I choose are season-specific. For example, for Spinach I choose some varieties that do better in fall and winter than in spring. In spring, we often go from 'too cold' to 'too hot' in about two days and sometimes spinach doesn't get to gtow for very long before the heat sets in, so I choose varieties that make smaller plants that mature faster. With a long, mild autumn I can grow some varieties of spinach that get larger, but which also have later DTMS and would likely be hit too hard by the spring heat. Sometimes it is a very subtle difference but it does matter. Winter Bloomsdale Spinach withstands cold and winter moisture a little differently than Bloomsdale Longstanding, which is why I choose it for fall, for example. Last year I planted a forage mixture for the deer and rabbits since there were so few native plants alive after the long hot summer and the wildlife was so starved, and it included turnips and collards that never froze all winter long, so this year I thought I'd plant more of them for us. It is not a bad wildfire year at my end of the state, and that is what determines how much of a fall garden I have most years. If the fires are bad in late summer and fall, I am too busy to plant a fall garden. Since the fires here haven't been too bad since late July, I have time for a fall garden. I just try to work with whatever the weather and real life allow me to do. Our "normal" wildfire season actually is in the winter months, but not much has been normal the last couple of yeas. Back in June and July when I was canning like a maniac, every day I hoped I could have just "one more day" without fires so I could get a bit more canning done. It used to be the fires only interfered with spring planting time, but lately they are a problem at different points year-round. Last summer, between the drought and the almost-daily wildfires I didn't can anything all summer long. This year, I canned day after day after day. I'm hoping for a quiet autumn, fire-wise, so I can work in the fall garden day after day in the same way. Ezzirah, I think it was wise to choose cool-season stuff. Now, if only the cool weather will arrive and cooperate with us. After suffering through these last two hot summers, I am determined to have a good fall garden. Having to hang out so much inside to avoid the heat all summer long for two summers has driven me crazy, because I'd much rather be in the garden. I've mostly dabbled in fall gardening in the past without getting overly serious about it, and a lot of that has been because of us being busy with fire department stuff in the fall, but there's been some major schedule changes to routine fall VFD fundraisers and community activities, so I ought to have more time free for the fall garden. Yay! I'd be remiss if I didn't add this last part for anyone considering a fall garden. Without a way to protect your plantings from wildlife, you have to share the plantings with them. Because I am surrounded by plentiful wildlife, my big garden has an 8' tall garden fence around it. Without that fence, I wouldn't even attempt a fall and winter garden because the wild animals would get it all. Even now, I have deer that come and nibble anything that I grow on the fence, but I don't mild sharing that little bit with them since they can't reach anything else, and they are hungry too. Dawn

The Bhut Jolokia wound up being enough to stuff full a ziploc bag that is 2.5" by 4.0". There are also enough ripe peppers on the plants to do another picking by this weekend. This will yield about a gallon of ripe peppers so roughly another 6000 seed. Trinidad Scorpion Moruga also has more ripe peppers but much fewer of them, maybe another 1/2 gallon. I had enough Moruga seed to stuff 2 coin envelopes completely full to overflowing. I've received several emails asking about trades. I will reply to them sometime this weekend. Meantime, I grew these to send to Glenn Drowns at Sandhill Preservation. The seed will be available in the 2013 catalog. DarJones

Made this quite a few times and it's become restaurants "new" thing here. One restaurant serves every Wed smoked pork and grits. Grits and greens **with my added notes 3 cups milk 1 cup water Use chicken stock skip the bullion cubes 1 chicken bouillon cube 1 cup "quick" grits 1 1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese 1 lb. greens (mustard, turnip, collard, spinach, chard, or any combo of these) or equivalent amount of frozen or canned greens Usegood GLORY CANNED SEASON TURNIP GREENS 1 Tbsp. bacon drippings (or oil or butter) don't need several slices of bacon, cooked and crumbled salt and pepper to taste Directions: In large heavy saucepan or pot heat the milk, water and bouillon cube to just below a boil. Slowly whisk in grits and cook for 5-10 minutes or until thickened, stirring often to prevent scorching. When grits are thickened, stir in 1 and 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese and allow to melt (reserve 1/4 cup for top). Remove from heat. Meanwhile, wash greens and heat bacon drippings in large skillet over high heat. Put greens in skillet while still a little wet from washing. Cook until thoroughly wilted, then drain. If using frozen greens, just heat and drain well; if canned, just drain well. Chop greens up very fine. Stir into grits mixture. Add salt and pepper to taste. Pour into casserole dish (I use 2 pie pans and freeze one of these for later). Top with crumbled bacon and remaining 1/4 cup cheese. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees F until bubbly, about 20-25 minutes. You want it to still be a little bit loose. It will thicken as it stands. Use broiler to brown top. This freezes well. Just thaw beforehand and cook as above, adding another 10-15 minutes.