I plant my 2nd wave of cool weather veggies in August. It depends on the weather, and amount of water we are getting as to the exact date...to be safe, mid-august. I've not grown kholrobi here, but at church we plant the hardier veggies: cabbage, chard, and broccoli a bit later, as they overwinter very well. Your warm weather veggies will catch up after this rain, and some warmer temps and sun. This has been an unusual year so far. GGG

Based upon what you're telling me it's feasible to plant warm weather veggies now, cucumbers and green beans. In fact, based upon what you've told me now is the ideal time to plant them. You also told me that it's possible to plant Romaine lettuce, carrots and turnips in July. My question is although you've recommended planting carrots, turnips, and romaine lettuce now, will the weather be too hot for them to grow and survive? Do you know of any tricks/tips to cool cool weather veggies down in hot weather? Essentially although you say I can plant them now, should I hold off and wait until later in the summer when it'll have cooled down, or will it not make a difference whether I plant them now or later towards the end of summer? I want to plant radishes and cabbage too, however would now be a bad time to plant them? Would the weather be too hot to plant them? Many of the seed packets say that you can plant cool weather veggies in mid-to-late summer, but I've no clue what constitutes as mid-to-late summer in Michigan, as I haven't lived here in years. Would it be too late to plant cabbage now or is it too hot to plant cabbage now? My concern with planting in later when it gets cooler is that it won't have enough time to mature before the snow sets in. The reason being is because it takes 70-90 days for the variety I have to mature, which doesn't include germination time, which is 7-10 days. I'm afraid if I plant cool weather veggies too soon, they'll just die due to weather being too hot and if I plant them too late then they won't mature until after winter starts, which at that point, they'll die due to weather being too cold.

Carol, You are just what I need. [g] A push to try to get a Fall garden going! It does seem like it will never be cooler, but today is nice any way. We use Kale and Broccoli the most of the fall garden. I like the dark Kale for ornamental plantings but the green for eating. I suppose I should consider a little bit of lettuce. What varieties are you going to use? Oh, and peas! I want to grow some of the sweet peas that you eat in the pod. We enjoy those. Sugar Snap maybe. How are you planning to start your seed? In the house or outdoors? I wondered if it was too hot outside to start them. Our eggplants have done nothing this year for some odd reason but we have peppers that are a good size and I'm letting them ripen before picking. With the days getting shorter, do the tomato plants stop putting out flowers? I can't remember? Surprisingly, we are picking nice ripe cherrie tomatoes and the vines and foliage are really clean this year so far. Our zuchinni had issues so I pulled the plants and I planted new seed about a week ago. I'm thinking I won't get any fruit from a plant started so late, but I had extra seed, so I thought I'd give it a try anyway. Especially since we had such a long warm fall last year. I also started string beans about 15 days ago and more last week, so I'm hoping to have a staggered harvest of them. Maybe I should sow another batch of string bean seeds too.

Larry, There are all kinds of insects everywhere. At least I am seeing a lot of the good predator bugs and hopefully they are eating the bad bugs. Unfortunately there's not a good predator bug that controls grasshoppers, but there are a lot of songbirds in my garden every day and I sure hope they are eating grasshoppers. It seems like all the insects that plagued our plants all summer have been busy reproducing because there's more now than ever. I love wheelbugs and have a few in my garden, which is always nice to see. I saw and killed a squash vine borer moth yesterday. I don't usually see them in September. I hate that the blister beetles found their way under the floating row cover, but it happens. The only time I don't have some stray bugs under row cover is when I transplant seedlings into the garden and cover them the very same day. That doesn't mean there aren't soil-borne pests that will be under the row cover or others that might hatch out under that, but at least most of the others aren't there. I always find fire ants under the row covers. I think they like the slight sun protection it gives them. Susan, Wheel bugs are so helpful in general that I am happy to see them, but I totally understand why you are not. The weather usually determines how bad of an insect year it will be. We need cool, wet, cloudy autumn through spring weather. Well, we need a cool summer too, but we never have one of those. Many, though not necessarily all, pest insects speed up their reproductive rate in the heat. So, insects that might take 2 or 3 or 4 weeks to complete a reproductive cycle in average weather can go through that reproductive cycle in less than a week in very hot weather. That's one reason that the insect population just explodes in hot years. Spider mites, in particular, get into such a fast reproductive cycle that their babies can be born pregnant. It also hurts us and helps them when winter stays pretty warm or when spring warms up very early like it has the last two years--they get a head start on reproducing and on attacking our plants while the plants are younger, smaller and more vulnerable. I've never seen insects as an overall group as bad as they've been the last two drought summers, although I have had much worse grasshopper years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is a shame we likely will not see the monarch migration. I did see a new, fresh monarch yesterday, so clearly some are in the area but I'm not seeing lots of them like I usually do. I am seeing plenty of other butterflies, including more and more sulphurs and swallowtails. You might try feeding the tomato plants that haven't bounced back from the pruning. I'm inclined to think that a feeding may boost them and kick them back into producing. I fed mine right after I pruned them back. Some bounced back and some didn't. We still are not getting much fruitset on anything except cherry types because our daytime highs are just too high. Yesterday we topped out at 98 degrees, and our relative humidity hit 14%. The fire pagers in our county went off at almost exactly the same time as they did the day before. In both cases, it was about the time we were at our maximum high temp and minimum low relative humidity. Although our county did not have an excessive number of fires this summer, I think our fire season is about to start if we don't get some rain. When fires start popping up at the same time every day, that's a clue that our weather combined with dry vegetation has reached the danger zone. This fire was further north than Thursday's, so it didn't involve our VFD but involved the three to our immediate north and they were out there for quite a while. That's a bad sign too. Wood mulch on the soil surface doesn't bind nitrogen. That only happens if the wood is worked into the soil itself. Normally in the fall, I add compost from my pile, grass clippings collected from mowing the lawn, and chopped/shredded autumn leaves to the beds. I just chop/shred the leaves by running over them with the lawn mower and catching them in the grasscatcher. You can add anything you want in terms of organic matter and soil amendments--manure, compost, alfalfa meal, mushroom compost, etc. Or, you can plant a winter cover crop like vetch or rye grass. Let them grow until it is almost planting time. Then, cut them and let them decompose in the soil, or rototill them into the soil, or pull them/dig them out and put them on the compost pile. The issue with rye grass is that its roots are so aggressive that you almost have to have a tiller to work the plants into the ground to get rid of them. I often use buckwheat, which goes from seed to blooming in maybe 5 or 6 weeks, as a short-term cover crop. As a bonus, it attracts beneficial insects. Unfortunately, frost kills it. I plant a ridiculous number of okra plants because it is easy to 'sneak' them into ornamental plantings. This year I planted about 30 so we had tons of okra and I have put a lot of it in the freezer. I finally got tired of picking the okra, so stopped picking it and am letting the pods got to seed to collect for next year. I actually have some pods that are dry and ready to harvest, so maybe I'll do that today. I could cut the pods this morning and sit and remove the seeds from them while watching college football today. One of my favorite ways to sneak okra into the ornamental beds is to plant tall varieties in the back of an ornamental bed that has 4 o'clocks and hollyhocks in it. So, the okra goes behind the hollyhocks and 4 o'clocks, and then in front of the four o'clocks I plant Swiss Chard in various colors and in front of the chard I plant some of the pepper varieties that stay shorter. It is pretty all the time, but after the hollyhocks have finished up blooming in mid-summer, the combination of okra, brightly-colored chard and pepper plants is a really pretty almost-tropical looking combination. Winter Density can grow most of the winter here but I will not necessarily say it will last all winter. However, it does tolerate some frost. I do plant it every year and have about 20 heads of it growing now, though they still are small. Once the temperatures are in the 20s, lettuce can get iffy, but covering them with floating row cover can both prolong their lives and keep the quality higher. In some past years, I've had good winter crops from several other kinds of lettuce, including Arctic King, January King, Rouge d'Hiver and Continuity Red. Really, though, since I started using floating row covers, I do not necessarily choose winter varieties for winter. There are lots of other greens that do well in fall and winter, especially with the use of a row cover to keep them a little warmer at night. Some winters I grow arugula, mizuna, tatsoi, mache, French sorrel and miner's lettuce. Spinach, kale and chard do great as winter greens too. I have planted a ridiculous amount of kale and Swiss Chard this fall, along with far too many collards, because the chickens love having fresh greens in winter. Some years I can keep winter greens going almost all winter. Spinach is particularly good at bouncing back even if damaged by cold weather and heavy frost, but in those years when we dip down into the single-digit temperatures, even lettuce and greens under row cover can freeze. Sometimes, though, they resprout from the roots. Oddly, one of our coldest periods here in our county is the first week of December. That's often when we get some of our coldest weather of the season. It sticks in my mind because that's when Marietta's Christmas Parade is. No matter how nice the weather is on the days leading up to the parade, it is almost guaranteed that we'll be freezing and shivering on parade night. It is common for us to be in the 20s on the night of the parade. If I put a heavy blanket over the row cover that is covering the greens, I usually can get the lettuce plants past that first really cold blast of air in December. This will be my first winter to grow lettuce in containers in the greenhouse. Of course, in the GH, the daytime heat due to the greenhouse effect is more of a worry than the nighttime lows. I checked the temperature in the greenhouse yesterday to see how much higher it was than the outdoor air temp. Even with 50% shade cloth and all the doors and vents open, it hit 111 degrees inside the greenhouse when it was 98 degrees outside. So, I'm still waiting and waiting and waiting for the temps to drop low enough that I can start using the greenhouse. That may not happen until sometime in October. Dawn