I am still struggling with a too large vegie garden that is full of weeds, BUT I discovered the soil forum on G/W and am now regaining my garden through lasagna gardening. I have some tomatoe plants that I affectionately call Godzillas -- they are enormous (just in flower though, starting to set fruit), squash plants that are taking off and look like they are going to smother everything in sight and I picked a couple of cukes this week. My broad beans are finished and the pole beans haven't started but we have a bumper crop of peas. Leafy greens and beets are doing ok (they aren't in the lasagna garden) and we have had a few artichokes. The best part of the garden though is the raspberries! They are huge, tasty, red beauties. I mulched them with leaf mould and grass clippings in the spring and have not had to water them much but they are obviously very happy. Except for a few white drupelets from the sun and heat they are just wonderful. Nothing tastes as good as your own produce. I love it.

I think Scarleta is right. Other than more peas, I don't know what else could grow on a trellis right now, and actually be ready to eat before the weather gets too cold/days too short. Not sure what happens if you crop a 2nd crop on top of the last; probably OK if there's no pests or disease, and you give the ground some compost and fertilizer.

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.