Cool season annuals are those planted in early spring/early fall (in places with mild winters) and usually replaced by warm season annuals when it starts to get hot. They look the best when nights are in the 40s, but many are hardy (tolerate frosts) and some can make it through the summer.. they just won't look as good. The most common are: pansy, viola, sweet alyssum, linaria, diascia, nemesia, snapdragon, lobelia, bacopa, dianthus, cornflower, calendula, nasturtium, stock, poppies, ornamental kale and cabbage, sweet pea, argyranthemum, regal geraniums, dusty miller, primrose, larkspur and delphinium. Some of those might be perennials in you climate. The list of warm season annuals is endless and I could name hundreds, but they're basically all the annuals that weren't listed above. I just wanted to point that in late April you'll most likely use only cool season annuals, as it'll probably be too cold to the warm season ones get going. Mauricio

essence you're moving into zone 8b. this zone runs roughly from the jacksonville to tifton, ga. area and covers the coast of georgia. everything in your list will grow well here depending on the variety - but mostly anything will have no problem. the humidity here can be unreal but in brunswick you will have a steady wind blowing most of the time. look for august temps to reach 110-115 with heat index - like clockwork one to two weeks out of the year. i've never had crops die from heat - as long as you give them plenty to drink. tomatoes will not yield as well in august but will produce again in september and october. the time to get seeds started is in mid-february indoors to get an early crop. last frost usually comes just before easter but sometimes right after - this year my guess is before. you live below the piedmont ridge so you will have a sandy soil with clay a few feet down. from macon down was all under water not to long ago so maybe you will want to do container gardening till you get an idea of what you're working with. there are plenty of horse stables and cow fields around for you to get free manure from so just get a few loads and condition your soil. georgia is a gardener and farmer's dream. more varieties of plants grow here than anywhere in the world - between tifton and macon being the hot spot. if you need any help or want any seeds email me. welcome to georgia. john jdlibby@hotmail.com Here is a link that might be useful: georgia plant hardiness zones

Charles, Yes, I plant them all in mid-winter through spring. When I lived in Fort Worth, some of these were fall plants only for me because Fort Worth warmed up and got too hot too early. Up here, usually the cold nights linger a bit later most years than they did down there and I can get good crops from most cool-season crops on this list most springs. The last two years we have warmed up too early in spring for some of them though. It is really hard for me to get good spring harvests from cauliflower or brussels sprouts in spring, so I plant them only for a fall harvest. I also have trouble with salsify and a few other odd things that need a long cool season. They do better in fall than spring, but I don't grow them much any more in either spring or fall. Up here in southcentral OK (I am just across the river from Gainesville, TX), the key is to plant a lot of them extra early (earlier than OSU recommends) and cover them up with floating row cover that offers some freeze and frost protection. I have floating row cover in several weights, and the heaviest one gives 8 degrees of frost protection. I have found if I cover up the plants with a double layer of row cover, it often will give the plants 12 or more degrees of frost protection. Using floating row cover changed my gardening life because it allows me to plant early and not lose the plants to cold weather. I also often lay down black plastic on top of the cool-season crop beds to warm up the soil while the air temps are still pretty cool. The warm soil can help cool-season seeds germinate more quickly than if I was trying to germinate them in cold soil. To have a good few months with cool-season plants, I really have to push the limits here in terms of planting early, but I figure I have nothing to lose by trying. The nice thing is that if we heat up too early and the cool-season crops fail to produce well (or at all), I know I'll have another chance with the fall garden. That happened last year with snap peas and broccoli. I had a wonderful fall harvest of broccoli, but still didn't get any snap peas. As it turned out, the grasshoppers, which exist in huge numbers in our rural area most years, loved the sugar snap peas so much they ate the plants down to the ground. For a while the peas tried valiantly to regrow, but after being eaten repeatedly, they gave up. I even had them under floating row cover, but the hoppers ate their way through it too. That's never happened before. Maybe I'll have sugar snap peas this spring if the weather cooperates. It also helps that I have a lot of space. When the garden was smaller, I pretty much had to choose between cool-season and warm-season crops in spring because there wasn't room for everything. We enlarged the garden every year until it reached its present size, so now I can grow pretty much whatever I want whenever I want. That helps. My favorite gardening magazine is "Texas Gardener", by the way, and if you've never seen it, you might want to check it out. I find it just as useful for me here in OK as I did when I lived in TX. You wouldn't believe how many great varieties for our part of the country I've found merely by reading about them in Texas Gardener. Two of the five gardening books I'm reading this winter are from Texas too---Dr. Bill Adams' book on Growing Tomatoes and Greg Grant's Vegetable and Fruit book. Dawn

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