Uh-oh!! I thought this morning here in NC at my brothers it felt like a winter chill. I guess back home (upper part of lower Michigan)I probably have snow now..... If the "palm part" (downstate) of the state has frosting temps then my "above knuckle part" (upstate) is bound to have freezing temps. Hoping my pipes hold unfrozen until I get home. Keeping fingers crossed too for the plants given me I tucked in before coming here to my brothers (my dad facing anurism surgery but with 40% lung capacity they have to keep him awake). Tests are being run now and praying things don't rupture before the surgery gets scheduled. He just got his walking cast off from the broken foot! He was malnurished etc. I brought down a few squash though and I will be making breakfast for him in the morning. Can't stand his place long at once though as I am asthmatic and he a chain smoker who won't quit.

Hi Bruce! You're right. I am in Love County. You can't actually see our place from I-35, but we are in the general vicinity of mile marker 9 or 10. So, geographically, you and I are just over a hop, skip and a jump away from one another's gardens. You can plant heat-lovers like more okra or black-eyed peas right now, or another crop of bush beans that would probably begin producing in early to mid-August. If you want to put in new pepper or tomato plants to produce in the fall, any time from now until late July is good for that. You could plant some of the pumpkins, like Jack Be Little or Lumina, that have relatively short maturity dates and have pumpkins in time for Halloween. It isn't too late for some of the bush-type watermelons like Sugar Baby. Or you can fill in that space with any kind of herb transplants that they still have in the garden center stores. I have herbs scattered around my garden to help lure in the beneficial insects. Do you want to have a full-fledged fall garden? If so, here's a link to planting dates. You'll notice that many fall crops have planting dates in mid-July. You have to baby them along sometimes, but you can grow lots of stuff for fall/early winter harvest. On some crops, like cabbage and broccoli, you will not have nearly as many insect problems on the fall crop as you might have on the spring crop. And, if you want to grow garlic, it is best when planted in the fall for a late spring or early summer harvest. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: fall planting dates

Pat, Most years you can get a good crop from fall corn if (a) you can water it enough in August to get it established and (b) it matures before frost gets it. Usually we are frost free until late Oct. or early Nov., but here at our house we have had a killing freeze as early as Sept. 30th, though only about once a decade. I've linked an older thread with a sequential planting calendar for now through fall. The earlier date in the date range is for more northern parts of the state and the later date is for more southern parts of the state. As you can see, it is time now to plant fall corn. ChickenCoupe, Well, raccoons get into virtually everything. Let me give you a few examples: They climb the trees and pull down the hummingbird feeders, unscrew the bottoms and drink the nectar. They toss the feeder parts into the shrubs and you have to search for them, find them, wash them, put the feeders back together again and refill them. Then, if you forget to bring in the feeders at night, they'll do it all over again. They also climb the trees and pull down all regular bird feedes and empty them of seed. They get into the chicken coop if your husband forgets and leaves the door open. Then they'll kill your chickens and your favorite rooster and leave feathers and dead body parts scattered all over. If they can manage to find a way into your fenced chicken run, they'll pour out the chicken feed from the feeders and eat it and will dirty the water in the waterers. They get into the chicken coop if the door is open during the evening because the free-ranging chickens haven't put themselves up yet and they steal your eggs right out of the nests. (So do skunks and snakes.) They love to harvest your corn for you. Of course, since they're doing the work and harvesting it, they eat it. They don't even wait for it to be ripe. Heck, this year, they starting harvesting ears before the ears were completely pollinated/fertilized. The tear into the ears and nibble them. If the ear is not sufficiently ripe, the toss it on the ground, and tear up another ear. Sometimes you come outside in the morning and have 10 or 20 not-yet-ripe ears chewed and then thrown on the ground. Obviously since they harvest unripe corn and we cannot harvest it until it is ripe, guess how much corn you get once the coons arrive in full force? Practically none. They'll harvest and eat tomatoes, melons, plums, peaches and strawberries. If you have tiny chicks in a brooder cage and they can reach the brooder, they'll pull the legs off the chicks and eat the legs. Of course, you're left with the corpses of tiny dead legless chicks because they can't pull them through the 1/4" hardware cloth of the brooder cage. If you have barn kittens in an open building, they'll kill and eat them. Friends of ours lost two mama cats and their litters to the raccoons a few years ago. Other friends lost their barn cats and kittens last year and also the year before that. If you grow tomato plants or pepper plants in pots on your patio, you have to have cages and or deer netting wrapped securely around the entire plant in such a manner that the coons cannot put the netting up or down or off the plant ir they'll strip the sweet bell peppers and tomatoes off your container plants. If you have a lily pond, they'll get into it and get your fish and tear up your water lilies in their eagerness to get your fish. You may think you have two coons but I suspect you have more. We have killed 11 coons this summer, and yet, if I walk out into the yard any time between 9 p.m. and sunrise, I'll likely to see 2 or 3 or 4 at any given moment in time. We do everything we can to protect our animals and plants from them, but all that works for us is shooting them. My DH and DS have started asking me "Where are they coming from? How many more can there be?" I think the answer for us is they are coming from drought-plagued, drier parts of Texas and western OK because we've never had as many before as we have this year. One of our neighbors lives closer to the river than we do so he has even worse raccoon issues than we do. He was determined to keep the raccoons from getting his corn in 2006, which was the second half of the 2005-2006 drought. I think that year he had 4 rows of 100' each. He put out a live trap before his corn was ripe and started catching one coon in the cage every night. He shot each one. (This is important, because otherwise you might think it is the same raccoon coming back night after night.) For eighteen nights in a row he caught and shoot a coon. How much corn did he get that year? None. Nada. Zilch. The raccoons got every ear. Sometimes I beat the coons to the corn, sometimes they beat me. This year we caged the early corn after the coons showed up when it started silking and we got all of it after the cage went up. We intended to move the cage to the mid-season corn, but didn't get around to it in time, and the coons got every ear worth getting. It didn't deter them in the least that the corn was interplanted "Three Sisters Style" with Seminole pumpkins and Red Ripper southern peas. They'll tear holes in window screens on your screened porch so they can get onto it to search for food, even though we don't feed any animals on that porch and no food is there. (The coons are the main reason our former screened porch is now a sunroom with glass windows instead of mere screens.) They even climb up on patio furniture on the front porch, stand on the furniture and knock on the window sometimes trying to get you to feed them. (They must have found someone who will feed them if they do this. We never feed them and usually send our dog, Sam, outside to chase them off. He's a good coon-chasing dog.) We have neighbors who have outdoor dogs that stay out all the time and if they forget to bring in the dog food bowls at night, the coons get into it even though the dogs are in the fenced dog yard too. Some years the coons are more of a problem than others. This year they are a huge, huge, huge problem here. In the past we trapped and released them if we could, but it is extremely hard to handle a violent coon in a cage and then we have to drive about 20 miles to find a place far enough away from other peoples' gardens and farm crops to release one, so we just shoot them. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Thread with Sequential Planting Calendar

Carol, For me, the likely difference this year is both that the combination of rain and some irrigation kept the garden producing AND we've had very few grassfires at our end of the county, so I haven't been running all over feeding/hydrating firefighters. In a drier year, I wouldn't have a lot left to harvest by now, and that's assuming I wasn't running to fires and even had time to harvest and put food by. The bulk of my food preservation is usually in spring/early sumer when the broccoli, corn, potatoes, green beans, onions and tomatoes are in production big-time. Okra, peppers, melons and black-eyed peas are usually a bit later, and then from late July on, there usually isn't much to put up because I cook it and we eat it about as quickly as I harvest it. So, in August and September, I'm more likely to be harvesting and drying herbs or deadheading flowers/seed saving, etc. This year is just odd all around....everything was late. Most of the tomatoes had to be dealt with in July, although there's enough every week to put up a couple of quarts, eat all we want, and give a few away. The peppers, though, just keep coming. If the fall green beans, black-eyed peas, cucumbers and sweet corn do well, I'll have no complaints....the spring green beans and corn weren't that great in terms of quantity produced. Ilene, I think I am going to pull most of the squash and all of the melon plants today. They've had every pest and disease problem under the sun in August and aren't healthy enough to bother with at this point. I really miss having the guineas and the free-range chickens. My garden is completely full of grasshoppers, squash bugs, stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs and the dreaded spider mites. I haven't seen any lady bugs this week. I wonder where they went. At least pulling the melons and squash will leave me some space for cold-season plants. Game bird, Sorry to hear about the pesticide burn. I just won't spray hardly anything at all in my garden other than Spinosad, which is organic. I was going to spray it today, but it is rainy, so there's no point. I hate using any spray at all, even organic ones. My melons have really declined, so I am yanking them out today. I think their problem mostly is red spider mites and there is nothing much you can do about them (or, at least, nothing I'll spray in my garden). I need to get the cold season stuff in the ground ASAP now that we're not having 100-degree days any more. Seems like we had to wait forever for the August temperatures to break here. Gardening is always a learning experience, and sometimes I think I have to re-learn the same lessons over and over again. Most years, some things produce heavily and others don't, so this year has been that way for me. My usually reliable potatoes and onions both did poorly, apparently because they didn't appreciate receiving 18" of rain in 4 or 5 weeks. Everything else, except beans, has done well though. Still, I am glad we don't rely solely on the garden for our produce. I am hoping for a late first freeze so the fall plants have a chance to be as productive as the spring plants have been. Dawn