I sow zinnias, celosia and gaillardia in spring for summer bloom. The season is winding down now so I'd save them for late winter sowing for blooms next year. Gaillardia would be fine to do now since it's a perennial so the seedlings will survive the winter just fine. Echinacea hates it here, but if you're going to try them now is a good time since they're very cold tolerant and will survive the winter just fine, although probably not next summer. In a few weeks I'll be sowing stuff for autumn and winter: geraniums, pansies, petunias, violas/johnny jump ups, lobelia, snapdragons and calendula. After that it'll be time for lettuce, cabbage, Swiss chard and spinach. There are some good garden guides out there and some good local gardening books too with good planting guides. Let us know what you plant, and when, and how it works out. It's fun to hear who is growing what, when! Happy gardening! Grant Here is a link that might be useful: Extreme Gardening, how to grow organic in the hostile desert, book

Carol, I bet it did grow well there in spite of the short growing season. I'm assuming they started their transplants indoors to get them large enough to plant out once the temps were in the appropriate range. And it is the exposure to sunlight that made the celery so green. Most commercially-raised celery is that whitish-green because the celery is blanched. I think the blanching is intended to keep the stalks tender as too much sunlight/heat gives you tougher stalks. Seedmama, Here's how Jeff Cox grows celery: GROWING CELERY: Several years ago I purchased a book by Jeff Cox called "Jeff Cox's 100 Greatest Garden Ideas". It is a terific book and I love it. One of his ideas is a way to grow celery even if you can't give it the marshy conditions it prefers. If I ever tried to grow celery here, I'd try Jeff's method. To start his seeds, he sows them 10 weeks before his last frost. He soaks his seed overnight before sowing them in peat pots and setting them on top of the fridge so the heat can help them sprout, which can take 2 weeks or longer. He digs a below-grade trench about a foot wide and 14" deep although he says you can do the same process with a raised bed if you'd rather build up than dig down. If growing in a raised bed, he recommends a minimum height of 6" and cautions anything raised any higher may get too hot for the celery. You still need 14" of depth, but with the 6" tall raised bed, you only have to dig down 8" instead of the whole 14". You remove the soil to a depth of 14" for the trench or 8" beneath the eventual raised bed and remove all the soil. Add compost and other organic amendments to create an enriched growing mix that will hold lots of moisure and refill the trench or, for the raised bed, refill the dug-out area and build the 6" tall raised bed above it. By the way, he recommends six celery plants per person. If you want, you can add tin cans with the tops and bottoms both removed or pieces of PVC pipe inserted vertically into the ground about to the same depth that your celery is planted, or a couple of inches deeper than that. To water, fill each can or piece of pipe with water and let the pipe carry the water down to the root level of the celery plants. In the illustration in the book, he has one vertical can or PVC pipe in between two celery plants in a sort of checkerboard pattern. (Texas tomato plant growers use this method to water tomatoes, only they use large flower pots or huge, instituitional-sized cans, to water the tomato plants...it is called the Texas Pot method.) After you harden off your seedlings, transplant them into the enriched soil which you've pre-moistened so it it nice and damp. He waters his transplants with an organic fertilizer consisting of 1 T. fish emulsion and 2 T. seaweed extract per one gallon of water. Mulch the top of the bed with leaves. As the plans grow keep adding leaves so the stalks are blanched. Blanching celery stalks (but not their topgrowth leaves which need sunlight to grow) helps improve their flavor and keep them tender. This is especially important in a hotter climate where heat stress can cause the stalks to get woody and tough. He recommends feeding monthly and watering as often as needed to keep the bed moist and damp but not soaking wet. His recommendation is that you harvest the plants roots and all before frost arrives in the fall. Store them in a box in a cool basement or similar area. If the storage area stays cool enough, celery will store for months. You also could store them in an extra fridge in your garage or laundry room or whatever. If you ever run across Jeff's book, it is a wonderful book with projects grouped by the season. Dawn

It depends where in zone 6 you are. Near the shore, you have more time, since the first frost is delayed by several weeks compared to inland. I have never had good luck with cool season crops for this very reason - I either wait too long and they don't mature, or I try too early and they bolt (or they fry!). Grass-planting season starts the 3rd week of August around here, so I guess if I were planning on trying fall peas or lettuce that's when I'd get ready.

That's why we try to get them into the ground as soon as we can...when they are ready to grow, they're gonna grow and it is important to get them into the ground before they get rootbound. Once they reach a certain point with a certain number of leaves, growth just explodes....as you can see with your root growth just this week. To a certain extent you can slow down plant growth by keeping the plants at a slightly cooler temperature. People often grow their seedlings at too high of an indoor temperature and get very rapid growth. While it seems cool at the time, it isn't necessarily a good thing. Plants that grow too fast indoors can get rootbound and stall. I have tried to keep mine from getting too tall too fast by moving them out to the greenhouse when they were tiny and had only 2 true leaves. It worked up to a point....but once the daytime highs were in the 70s, their growth accelerated even though the nights in the greenhouse usually were in the 40s or low 50s. Inside the house I try to keep them at 60-65 degrees and no warmer, which usually means closing off the heating vent in the room where the light shelf is because that many lights make enough heat on their own. Sometimes I even close off that room from the rest of the house and open windows to let some cool outdoors air come in to cool down the room. I'll link the soil temperatures below. You should go by the 3-day average, but it will seem low because it is reflecting the cold days/nights we just had. You could look at the 1-day and see what a difference a warm day and night makes. With the nice weather we're having now, the 3-day averages will climb pretty fast, at least until next week's cold front rolls through. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: 3-Day Ave Soil Temps At 4