Okay. Last year, farmerdill gave me his planting schedule for fall gardens. I copied it all into my garden journal so I wouldn't forget. Here goes. Mid July: Start collards, brocolli, cauliflour, and cabbage from seed. Sow it into pots, barely covering the seed with a light dusting of potting mix. Set the pots into dappled shade and water daily. Dappled shade for me is on my deck under the deck benches. Underneath there, the plants get full sun in the morning until approximately midday and light to full shade the rest of the day. It works. This year too, remarkably. Also, in July, I pull most of my first crops: tomatoes, beans, squash, etc. which are now finished and replant them, beginning to leave room for cool season crops. This year I have successfully seeded okra, cowpeas, cucumbers, and squash, though last year mildew got the squash and cucs. Also, it's helpful to keep the squash under row covers to keep squash vine borers away from them at least until they begin to bloom. August:Late month direct sow turnips, rutabagas, mustard greens, and Asian greens. You can also sow carrots and beets, though I have yet to get a good stand of beets. Septembmer: set out your seed started brassicas from July around the middle of the month. You can still direct sow leafy greens too. Mid month, start onion seeds (short day) in flats. And in the third or fourth week, plant lettuce, garlic, spinach (tough), and red mustard. Plant the onion seedlings into the garden in late November or early December. It helps to get better germination in extreme heat if you cover the sown beds with fabric row cover and water through the fabric. I guess it holds the moisture in the beds longer. You certainly need to water daily until germination, which is really fast, 3-4 days for most things. I have only had a fall garden two years now, but it's wonderful! I keep all my greens and lettuces under floating row covers draped over fence wire hoops and both years, absolutely everything lived and produced all winter long. (Temps above 10 both winters.) I also mulch the beds well with pinestraw. This is for freeze protection, but it also has a benefit of keeping the greens perfectly clean. If you harvest the leaves with scissors and don't pull the plants out by the roots, cleaning the greens is a snap. I hope this helps you!

I grow indeterminate tomatos in containers in downtown Houston. Muching is a necessity to keep water evaporation low and lower the shallow soil temperature. I use plastic with minimum size holes. The trick is to use white or light color plastic to avoid a heat sink effect. The Houston sun and heat can fry my heroic plants. I've seen locals use a patch of aluminum foil around the plant. Theory is that sun light and heat are actually reflected upwards reducing soil temperature and also lighting up the underside of the leaves. Unless they fry, my indeterminates can continue to set fruit through November. Jack

There are many ways to store produce. Each type of veggie or fruit has specific storage requirements, and many of them can be stored in different ways. You have to tailor your storage method to the specific fruit or vegetable's needs as well as how you like to eat the foods. Some veggies or fruit can be stored 'fresh' for a relatively long time, while others have a relatively short storage period in the fresh stage. Stone fruit (fruit with pits like cherries, peaches, apricot and plums) and berries have a relatively short shelf life as fresh fruit, but they can be preserved using multiple methods. For example, with peaches you can preserve them by freezing them, canning them as peach halves or slices, pickling them, dehydrating them, or by turning them into jam, jelly, syrup, pie filling, conserve, marmalade or fruit butters (plain or spiced). You can use peaches in some fruit salsa recipes. That gives you a lot of options for the peaches you cannot eat fresh. In a good fruit year, a tree will give you more fruit than you possibly could eat fresh and in a timely manner. While stone fruits don't store well in a root cellar, or at least only for a pretty brief time, apples can be stored for months if your root cellar is cool enough. We use a combination of canning, freezing, dehydrating, fermentation and root cellaring, so I'll briefly mention each one. ROOT CELLARING: There are entire books on this subject and you don't have to actually have a root cellar to use root cellaring techniques. Some people use in-ground tornado shelters as root cellars, other use home basements, and others dig storage pits in the ground. As long as you can provide the appropriate air temperature and relative humidity, you can root cellar quite a few veggies, including potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, winter squash and pumpkins, and miscellaneous root crops like carrots, parsnips and turnips. Some of these can be stored on open shelves and others can be stored in containers of sand. Even without any sort of a cellar, many of them can be keep indoors in a cool, dry location where the humidity stays fairly constant. I often keep sweet potatoes in plastic trays in an extra bedroom. The foods our family most commonly store this way are onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squash, and sometimes carrots or cabbage. Winter squash, in particular, can be stored up to about a year in a cellar type situation. FREEZING: This works best if you don't have to worry after frequent power outages like the ones often caused by freezing rain or sleet. I am far enough south that we rarely have power outages, so I use freezing as one of my primary storage methods. I have 3 freezers. During the height of the canning/storage season, all 3 will fill up. Then, throughout the year as we empty them out, I consolidate the remaining produce to one freezer and unplug the other two. Right now we are down to 1 and 1/2 freezer full of food. By May, we'll probably be down to one freezer, but then the harvest will start rolling in and I'll start filling up freezers again. With freezing, it is important to use the appropriate methods, of which blanching is one, to ensure food quality. Every year when we harvest onions, I set aside enough to last us about 6 months for fresh eating, then chop or slice the remainder. I put them in 1/2 C. quantities in plastic ziplock bags and put the smaller bags in larger 1 or 2 gallon bags. They are great to use in any recipe you'll be cooking and do not, therefore, require crisp onions. I store the onions for fresh eating in netting tubes in my tornado shelter. The foods we usually store this way include broccoli, carrots, corn, some of the onions, sugar snap peas, green peas, green snap beans, okra, southern peas (zipper, cream, purplehull pinkeyes, blackeyes, etc.), corn, spinach, some cabbage (in the form of freezer slaw), some melons (you can make melon balls and freeze them, then thaw them and eat them half-thawed so they don't get mushy), summer squash (frozen sliced for use in casseroles, soups or stews or frozen shredded for use in zucchini bread, muffins, cakes and cookies), sweet and hot peppers to be used in cooking after they are thawed, and some fruits like peaches or apricots, which can be frozen and then eaten as plain fruit when half-thawed or which can be used in pies, cobblers, and homemade ice cream. CANNING: There are many ways to preserve by canning. With some methods you use a boiling water bath and with others you must use a pressure canner. The most important thing is to always use safety-approved recipes and do not change the recipes unless various options are listed. Any cange you make to a canning recipe can alter the density or pH of the finished product and that can lead to the growth of various microorganisms that can be deadly for whoever eats that food. I do a lot of canning in a good year and not so much in a bad year. The items I most commonly can are tomatoes (as pasta sauce, canned stewed tomatoes, canned whole tomatoes and particularly as salsa), peppers, cucumbers canned as pickles, and jams, jellies, ice cream toppings and syrup. Most the jams and jellies are made from fruit, but I do make quite a lot of Habanero Gold pepper/apricot jelly and jalapeno jelly. DEHYDRATING: There are different methods you can use to dehydrate food. You can build your own solar dryer from plans found on the internet, you can purchase a stand-alone dehydrator or, if you have a oven that has a convection oven feature, you often can use it to dehydrate food. My stove has a convection oven mode and within that mode, it has a 'dehydrate' mode. I use my oven to dehydrate food all summer long. You can dry almost anything you raise. I mostly dehydrate tomatoes and peppers. I dehydrate thousands of bite-sized tomatoes in a good year and we eat them in the months where there are no fresh tomatoes from the garden. Dried peppers or garlic can be ground down into pepper flakes, pepper powder and garlic powder. With dehydration, the key is to dry the foods down to a very low moisture level for storage in your pantry. If you don't get them dry enough, mold will form and grow. Or, you can dehydrate them and then store them in the freezer. Some produce can be allowed to dry on the plant. This includes beans and southern peas. Then all you do is remove them from the hulls and store them in jars or bags. FERMENTATION: Some foods can be preserved using various methods of fermentation. About the only fermentation I do involves making sauerkraut out of cabbage. Some people also make kim-chi. LONG-TERM REFRIGERATION: Some veggies will hold a very long time in the refrigerator, including carrots and cabbages. I have kept both in the extra refrigerator in the garage for months with no discernable loss of quality. Leeks can be kept in a refrigerator for several weeks. There are many ways to store food and you'll learn through experimentation which ones work best for you. Different people like different things. Some people prefer to can their green beans in a pressure canner, while others prefer to freeze them. Different strokes for different folks. The best guide to food preservation is the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation. It is the bible of food preservation and you will not find unsafe recipes or recommendations there. Otherwise, there are often good recipes on the websites of companies that make and sell canning supplies and they can be trusted. The Ball Blue Book of Canning is a good basic guide and can be purchased on the canning aisle at places like Wal-Mart for about $10.00. If this is your first year to raise a garden, I wouldn't worry excessively about how to store the produce,and I wouldn't spend a lot of money on food preservation supplies until I knew I was going to have a surplus to store. Sometimes it takes a few years of gardening experience to raise enough of a produce surplus that you have to worry about long-term storage. You also have to have a pretty large garden to produce large amounts of most produce. I love filling up our freezers, canning closet and root cellar (tornado shelter) with food from our garden, but it can be very time-consuming. It is better to start small and work your way up to processing ever-enlarging amounts of produce as you gain experience. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: National Center for Home Food Preservation

Alot of us use SmartDraw--you can do floorplans or elevations for virtually any room in the house + many other things that I don't use it for. It was very easy to learn IMO. They have a ton of preset appliances, fixtures, cabinets, doors, etc to choose from. You can download a 7 day free trial to see how it works & how you like it. Cost is $197 to buy it for 1 user. If you like, you can put my user name in the search bar at the bottom of the page in the 'Building a Home', 'Kitchen', & 'Laundry' forums to see some of what I've been able to do with it. Good luck!