Oh, I'm thinking about fall root crops like turnips if I can find the room.

That is what I am doing right now. I have been reading the market garden by Jean Martin Forties for inspiration. Planning is the toughest pert for me. I don't want to miss an opportune planting time like I did last year. Sorry not much help just letting you know you are not alone. :)

I was recently reminded about all this and how I need to realize that "doing it" is what it takes to get it in my head ! It always feels so reassuring to get that next bit of experience in. Still, we gotta have some type of plan.

I recall Dawn writing about snap beans or green beans often producing a fall crop once the heat dissipates.

It's all just as confusing to me, really !

bon

AmyinOwasso,

Sometimes after you dig your Irish potato's you can plant sweet potatoes in their place and still have time to make a few before frost. You can interplant onions between your brassica rows and not interfere with anything. You can plant beans & Turnips the middle of Aug. where ever you can find a space and they will usually make before frost. You might get away with planting things like squash, cukes & sweet potatoes between your tomato plants. I'm not a fall garden expert but sometimes I am able to make a little something before frost, use your imagination.

I have a lot of systems, each adapted to a certain kind of weather year (like a long cold winter followed by short spring and then a hot summer or a short warm winter followed bya hot spring and hotter summer or.......any other combination possible). The problem is that when we do our first round of seed starting, and then our first round of transplanting, we don't know what the weather is going to do 1, 2 or 3 months down the road, so we're always just guessing and trying to guess well enough that our plan matches up with the current year's weather. You have to be flexible and adapt to whatever conditions you get in any given year. I never get the same weather and climate conditions two years in a row, so the only thing that is certain is that whatever I did last year likely will not be exactly the same thing I do in the current year because the conditions will not be the same.

I try to get my cool-season crops in the ground mostly in February or they will be producing so late that it is hard to succession plant the warm-season plants I want to to have follow them in a timely manner. So, to ensure that I have enough room for warm season plants, I divide the front garden in half. Half of it gets cold-season crops planted in January thru February or sometimes early March. The other half gets warm-season plants planted from March through mid-April. By mid- to late-April all the space generally is filled and anything else that gets planted will be interplanted with existing plants or will be used to fill in "holes" that develop as we harvest and use cool-season crops.

What gets planted in Feb through March? Potatoes, onions, cabbage, broccoli, swiss chard, sugar snap peas, lettuce and carrots usually. I usually save beets, brussels sprouts, turnips and cauliflower for summer planting for a fall/winter harvest. Sometimes if the local stores have cauliflower plants and brussels sprouts plants in January, I'll buy a few and plug them into the garden somewhere, but I do so with the knowledge that if we get hot too early, they won't produce a crop.

Warm-season plants that go into the ground in March usually are tomato plants (with row cover protection as needed) and sweet corn. If the weather is warm enough, I might get bush beans in the ground in March. I believe I got bush beans in around the last week of March last year, as our last frost/freeze was the first week in March. It always is an infernal race to beat the heat because once the heat sets in, all three of these warm-season crops slow down production. All of these are in their own beds, separate from the cool-season crops. I usually interplant some cool and warm season herbs in each bed. It is amazing how many herbs you can squeeze in around everything else.

Sometime in April, I'll but the pepper transplants in the ground, ofter interplanting them with onions. (More on that in a second.) Also in April, still in their own beds separate from the cool-season crops, I'll plant cucumbers and a succession crop of bush beans about 3-4 weeks after I put the first beans in the ground. The timing depends on soil and air temperatures more than on any calendar date, so I keep my soil thermometer handy and keep an eye on the forecast. By this time, I sometimes have the earliest summer squash plants in the ground. This is primarily to give them a chance to flower and make squash before the squash vine borers show up because once the SVBs show up, the summer squash plants (except for the Korea summer squashes) are living on borrowed time. They may not like the coolish nights but they survive them and produce. By this time, my front garden is filling up and space is getting tight, so I start squeezing things in.

With onions, I sporadically pull 3, 4 or 5 green (immature) onions to use in cooking as scallions. I pull them from the same general location within the onion bed, which leaves a "hole" in the midst of a bunch of onions. I also start pulling an occasional half-grown onion to use in cooking, which also leaves little holes in the garden. When the soil/air temperatures are warm enough, I come back and plug in pepper transplants into each of those holes. If I am careful and select/pull the onions at careful spacing over a period of weeks, I can squeeze in a couple dozen pepper plants into the onion beds that way. By the time the pepper plants are getting large enough to compete with the onions, the onions are maturing and coming out. Because onions and peppers both are heavy feeders, it works well to have them in the same bed. I generally do this with the short-day onions, which mature as early as May in my garden if I plant them in mid-February. I have, however, also done it with some of the intermediate day onions some years.

I use that same method to eventually plug in winter squash, pumpkin and okra plants into the "holes" in the onion beds that I make by pulling scallions or an occasional half-grown onion to use in cooking from the beds of intermediate and long day-length onions. Again, by the time the newly plugged-in transplants are getting a decent size, I'm harvesting onions and the pepper plants then rule the former onion beds. This only works because I plant onions in mid-February. If I wait until, let's say, mid-March to plant the onions, there's no way that I can be pulling/using the young onions early enough to plug in pepper, squash, and okra plants into the middle of those beds as early as I prefer to do it.

To the casual observer who just drives by my garden and looks at it, I'm sure it is baffling to see an occasional pepper, okra or squash plant in a sea of onions, but there's a method to my madness and it works well for me. This past , I even plugged in watermelon seedlings into holes in the bed of late-daylength onions. (I only grow 2 late types---Red River which is considered to be either a late intermediate daylength onion or a short long-day onion, and Highlander, which is an extra-early maturing long-daylength onion. By the time I was harvesting those mature onions, the watermelon vines were running down the beds (kinda like a living ground cover) and starting to bloom, and we had baby watermelons before the late-day onions even had cured. Admittedly the onions took a long time to cure because all the rain made them big and full of excess moisture. It always amuses me to see a friend drop by after not seeing he garden for a couple of weeks....and you can tell they are baffled because all of a sudden all the onions are gone and there's fairly good-sized plants in that space. Really, the replacement plants had been there for ages, but folks don't seem to notice. I'm guessing maybe they see the warm-season plants early on and just think that I'm letting weeds grow among the onions.

I often sow lettuce and carrot seeds in the tomato beds even before I put the tomato transplants in the ground. The lettuce and carrot seeds sprout and grow and, once the soil temperatures are warm enough for tomato plants, I come back and plug in tomato plants, just yanking out baby carrots and lettuces to make room for each tomato plant. Then I have my tomato plants growing in a sea of lettuce and carrots that effectively serve as a living ground cover for them. It sounds crazy, but it gives me three crops in the space normally used for one. As the carrots and lettuce come out at harvest time, I plug in herbs and warm-season flowers I've raised from seed. If a tomato plant dies, I don't mourn its death. I just yank it out and throw it on the compost pile and put something else in its place. What I put there will vary depending on what time of the season it is.

Meanwhile, in whichever bed got the pea trellis in the current year, I have sugar snap peas growing alongside and climbing up the trellis, which is 6' tall and usually runs roughly 30-40' long depending on which raised bed gets it that year. The trellis is on the north side of a bed that runs east-west so it will not cast shade on the southern edge of the bed. Most years, I put cabbage and broccoli plants along the southern side of the bed. I use cabbage and broccoli varieties with very short DTMs. Eventually, as the peas finish up, which can vary from anytime in May to mid- June, I plug in icebox watermelons and muskelons to climb the trellis. As the cabbage and broccoli plants come out of the ground in May or June, I plug in dwarf okra or bush type southern peas. Or, sometimes sweet potatoes. Some years, I plug the icebox watermelons into the onion beds and grow vining type southern peas on the trellis. I change it up every year, and it is important to move the trellis to a new bed every year so the peas get rotated. Other years, I plug in peppers into the open space where the cabbage and broccoli had grown, and put standard sized okra in the onion beds once the onions are out.

Pole beans get planted along the north or west garden fence to climb it. Sometimes they produce in spring/summer and other times not until fall. It really is dependant on the weather. Usually with bush beans, after they have produced in the early summer, I just yank them out and then put fall tomato plants or something else in their space. I might plant a succession crop of bush beans elsewhere. Much depends on how full the freezers are getting and on how tired I am of processing beans. By being flexible, I can use whatever succession plantings I choose to produce more of whatever veggies I think we don't have enough of yet at that point. If the freezers are filling up, the dehydrator is staying busy and I am tired of canning, I often just put in lots of flowers and herbs as succession crops.

I often put winter squash plants or watermelon plants along the southern and eastern edges of the rows of corn which I grow in the front and back garden, sometimes in both gardens in the same year and sometimes in alternate gardens in alternate years. It helps to keep both the coons and the corn earworms guesssing. After the corn is harvested, the winter squash or watermelon vines spread and fill in that area where the corn had been growing. It works pretty well most years. With corn planted in late March, and with the use of corn varieties that generally mature for me before the end of June (my early corn usually matures by Memorial Day weekend), the winter squash plants have tons of time to flower and form fruit as they tend to produce until frost.

I almost never wait for one crop to finish up completely and then replace it with something else. Our weather here just doesn't allow that most years. Instead, I'm constantly interplanting warm-season crops into beds that already have cool-season crops already established. I also interplant with herbs and flowers, both cool-season ones and warm-season ones. It may look to a casual observer like there's no rhyme or reason to how I do things, but I know what I am doing---I am using up every square inch available to me and trying to keep the entire garden filled with plants at all times. Any area that doesn't have a desirable plant in it is likely to have weeds sprout, so I'd just as soon have control over what grows in the empty spots instead of waiting to see if Mother Nature intends for bindweed, pigweed or lambsquarters to pop up in any bare spot.

My favorite way to succession crop is to start beans, southern peas, melons, watermelons or winter squash in paper cups that I can plug into the ground. That way, I always have plants coming along to plug into the ground. Some years, I'll have a long raised bed filled with tons of bush bean plants. After I harvest the last beans in the morning, I yank out all the plants and throw them on the compost pile. Then I go inside and have lunch, and spend the afternoon processing all the beans for fresh eating and/or storage. I go outside with my flat of tiny southern pea plants in paper cups in late afternoon, usually after the pecan tree is shading the garden and I put those plants in the ground, paper cups and all. I water them in, spread grass clipping mulch around them, and I'm done. If you visited me and my garden that morning, you saw me picking beans. If you came by at late morning, you may have seen fresh dirt and an empty bed because I just removed all the spent bean plants. If you stop by tomorrow morning, you'll see small, perfectly spaced southern pea plants that seemingly sprouted overnight. It is fun to see people's reactions if they aren't well-acquainted with my follow-on cropping. The reason I like to do this instead of sowing seed in the ground is that I get a quicker harvest from the succession crop if the plants already are, let's say, two weeks old when I put them in the ground. I'll all about getting the maximum harvest, so I prefer to use transplants as much as I can....which is something John Jeavons advocates in his "How To Grow More Vegetables...." book.

I really don't plan ahead for the succession crops. I don't have a schedule. I don't have a rigid routine. What usually happens is that one day I decide it is time for peppers to go into the ground and I walk out to the garden with my flat of pepper plants in my hand and stop and survey the garden and decide then and there where I will put them. This might drive a "planner" who likes things all neat and tidy absolutely insane, but it doesn't bother me at all. Somehow, every year, it all works out, but I've been doing it a long time and I am in sort of a rhythm or routine where I do things a certain way even without formally planning it out.

I usually know by mid-April exactly which cool-season crops are producing well and which ones are sluggish and not doing much. If we are getting hot fast, I may opt to yank out non-productive cool-season crops that just aren't progressing well and then replace them with warm-season crops.

Trying to keep a garden full of succession plants is like running on a hamster wheel. You start planting in winter and you never really stop. I've always got flats and flats of veggie, flower and herb transplants waiting in the wings to go into the garden and replace stuff. If the garden plants are taking too long to produce and my seedlings are getting lanky and looking like they are tired of being in flats, I move them to the shady area at the west end of the garden to slow down their grown and keep them cool. I also water them sparingly to keep them from growing too much while still in the paper cups.

I also use my entire garden fence to grow vining plants: pole beans, cucumbers, icebox watermelons, muskmelons, runner beans, Armenian cucumbers, vining types of winter squash, gourds, vining (C. moschata) types of Korean summer squash, and lots of flowers. When you grow as many of your crops vertically as you can, you triple the amount of produce you can produce in your square footage.

Small things like radishes get tucked into any available space to serve as a living ground cover. Rhubarb grows in molasses feed tub containers. Sometimes Swiss chard does too.

Cucumbers usually get their own trellis in the back garden where I grow them on a cucumber house. You're wondering what a cucumber house is? We had one of those pop-up canopies that you use for camping or tailgating or whatever. It has a frame made of galvanized steel and then the canopy is some sort of canvas type material. I put up the canopy frame in the back garden one year and left the canvas top in the garage. It has been there ever since, though I move it from one spot to another within the back garden every year. I attached woven wire fencing to the metal frame with zip ties, effectively creating four walls. I left an opening 3' wide in the east-facing wall so that I could walk inside the cucumber house and pick cucumbers from either inside or outside the house. I plant cucumbers to climb all 4 walls of the cucumber house. Usually I plant two types of pickling cukes. I plant the earlier ones on the east and south wall and the later ones on the west and north wall. They climb both the woven wire fencing and the metal framing, and when they reach the top of the walls, they climb the metal framing to give me a light "roof". If I have leftover pepper plants after I plant the front garden (and I usually do), then I plant them inside the cucumber house where they thrive in the light shade there. Sometimes, if it is a wet year and the cucumbers finish up pretty early, like in July, I yank them out and replace them with pole beans for fall or with Seminole squash or pole southern peas or Armenian cucumbers (you can use them like cukes when the fruit or small or like melons when the fruits are large, albeit they aren't necessarily very sweet like we Americans like our melons).

I use the back garden fence for anything/everything that vines as well, though the deer nibble everything that grows on the fence. They never have nibbled it enough to kill the plants. Sometimes I come back and plant fall tomato and pepper plants in the back garden. Since it is a relatively new garden spot (I think this is its 4th year or maybe its fifth), I don't have a real established routine yet because I'm still figuring out how best to use it. It does have fig trees, native persimmon trees, comfrey plants and artemisia at its northern end, so a lot of that back garden space is filled with plants that come back on their own. It has some coneflowers back there and some reseeding annuals like zinnias, so I can just about halfway ignore it and it fills up with fairly beautiful things anyway. It will be interesting to see what survived 77.7" of rainfall this year. I know the comfrey did because it is big and green and pretty right now, but I don't know if the artemisia did. It tends to not like a whole lot of moisture.

I cannot yet grow root crops back there in the back because the voles eat them all since there's not yet any hardware-cloth-lined raised beds back there (or any raised beds of any kind) and in dry years the voles have started eating the roots of southern peas and cucumber in July when it is hot and dry, so I need to, at some point, built raised beds back there. It's been a great place for corn, cucumbers and winter squash though, so that takes a lot of pressure off the front garden.

Irish potatoes can only be grown in the hardware-cloth-line raised beds in the front garden, and I never have a really good succession plan for them. Usually, by the time they are ready to be dug, I am tired of planting. Often, I just plug ornamental plants into the potato bed after I have dug potatoes and added a lot of compost to it. This year I planted a lot lantana and dahlia plants there along with a few herbs and it was the butterflies' favorite destination for the rest of the summer. Due to all the rainfall, it wasn't the best potato year, and some of the plants died prematurely due to foliar disease. So, I'd dig out whatever potatoes they managed to set and size up and then plugged either a dahlia or lantana plant into their space. Slowly the whole potato bed switched over from potatoes to flowers. Were there times it seemed like the big potato plants were swallowing up the smaller flowers and blocking their sun? Of course, but I knew the potato plants were coming out eventually and just ignored that. It all works out in the end.

Trying to plan and be rigid about what goes where and when, where and how just drives me up the wall. I like to be a free spirit and plug in plants into available space. It is a method that never fails. I tried planning things out on paper our first year, drawing elaborate little graphs on graph paper and such and then it drove me crazy to try to make the garden fit to the schedule I devised in my mind. Once I figured out that it worked better to just chill and go with the flow, it is amazing how much easier gardening became and how much more fun and relaxing.

Sometimes the weather throws you a curve ball. For example, maybe the heat arrives in April like it did down here in 2011 and the sugar snap peas just stall and it becomes apparent they aren't happy and aren't going to set peas. Fine, I don't get mad, I just yank them out, throw them on the compost pile and plant something else in their space. There's no point in sitting around for a month or two waiting for something to produce when it is becoming apparent to you that it will not be producing a bumper crop (or any crop at all). That's wasting space. Just move on. You have to work with whatever you get in a garden and there's never a perfect year. If 80% of what I planted gives us a great harvest, then I consider it a wonderful year. There's never really a bad year, although 2011 certainly came close.

I hope this helps. If I had a really set routine or plan, I'd share it, but I don't. I just go with the flow and, remember always, that what gets planted when is based on a combination of soil temperatures, air temperatures and the weather forecast, not on a calendar. Once you learn to ignore the calendar and work with the conditions you have, all sorts of problems resolve themselves and you never feel like you're behind schedule...because there isn't really a schedule.

Fred is a calendar guy, a schedule guy and a routine guy. He also is on higher ground than I am and he doesn't get the late cold some years like I do, so he's always on my case about when am I going to get this or that planted. I just remind him that we are colder here than he is at his place and that I will plant accordingly. You have to find what works for you.

Dawn

LOL, Dawn, I think you could make my OCD husband cry. While I like your style, and I know my plan won't work out exactly, I am trying to get a basic idea of what will go where, so I can pare down my seed orders to something reasonable. For some reason I thought a couple of years into gardening I wouldn't need to buy seeds...I would save seeds and use the ones I already had, right? LOL I suppose I don't NEED more (except for what I'm out of) but I WANT ....EVERYTHING.

I would love to be more free-form but I don't have the knowledge to feel comfortable yet. Some of areas are wilder than others but since I am going to go to market I want to have a sort of plan to follow. I love the idea of peppers in the onion area. Last year marigolds came up in the mulch on the onion bed. It was great timing because they shaded the onions nicely from the heat. That bed the onions were twice as big as the bare bed. I wish u could turn your posts into audio to listen to over and over till I get it.

2011 was the worst year. My very first year to garden and we worked so hard and got nothing. I would have gave up if it weren't for OK gw and locals saying try again that wasn't a normal year.

Amy - I always plan something to go in the tomato spots after my tomatoes are done. Never. Happens. Dawn, I like your style! Great tips about lettuce and carrots under the tomatoes. Gonna try that this year! I'm also planning to go up, up, up this year so I read the bits about growing on your fences with interest. Also, let's talk some more about rhubarb in containers! That's working for you?

LOL Kate. I told my husband today that 20 tomato plants probably would not be enough. He thought that was so funny. It's not like you can pull up a producing tomato plant, right? I pulled one up last year because it tasted bad. It was hard. I am still working out how many we need. If 2015 had been a normal year I think I would have had too many tomatoes. I think I had 37 last year, so I'm actually cutting back. ;)

Thank you Mulberryknob, I have finally come up with a plan, but I will keep these in mind as I tweak the plan. Tell me about what you are growing in your green house. I can eat the lettuce in mine, nothing else is progressing. Do you heat it?

Amy, right now in the greenhouse I have lettuce, bok choy, tatsoi, miner's lettuce (WAY too much miner's lettuce because I let the stuff seed late last spring) spinach, radishes, (French Breakfast just finishing up) arugula (transplanted from babies that came up outside in late summer from self seeding plants left last spring) onions, (sets that I replanted from some that didn't make decent sized bulbs last spring, and swiss chard. The spinach and Swiss chard are still small so I'm not picking them, but have enough of everything else to pick for salads 2 or 3 times a week--or more of the miner's lettuce. Later the spinach and Swiss chard will be used for steaming greens. I have learned that the tougher lettuces do better than the tender leafed types. The black seeded Simpson has really died back already at a very young age. The romaine types do better. The ones that selfseeded in there last spring also are doing well. And no we don't heat it. After a sunny day with no wind overnight the temp will stay 8-10 degrees higher overnight. So far we haven't covered the beds but if the outdoor temp goes lower than 20, we throw old sheets over the plants.

Planting my onions and peppers together has worked well for me also. I have a small garden but usually bigger plans. I follow the Dixondale suggestions for growing onions but increase the space between rows to allow for a row of peppers to go in later. If all goes well the onions come out around the time the peppers need more room. Here is a picture of last year.

BixbyM, that looks great. Love your drip system. Mulberryknob, I have been struggling with what to do about the cold in the greenhouse. Mine stays about 4* warmer than outside air...if there is sunshine the day before. I put the thing in a low spot and I'm afraid to run electricity in there till (if) it dries out. We are experimenting with a flowerpot with candles under it to warm it a touch. Candles didn't work well. We bought an oil lantern, but I didn't want to use lamp oil, heard you could use cooking oil. The advantage being less chance of a fire. And that would be because it won't stay lit...the oil won't wick properly. Currently trying a dish of cooking oil with floating wicks. It's messy and a pain and a little bit scary (I know Dawn will shake her head when she reads it). Last year I said I wasn't messing with anything that had to be covered. I haven't covered anything outside the green house. But I want the things in there to make it longer. We'll see.

Our greenhouse is big enough that we paved the area in front of the door and laid gravel in the paths between the beds. We also filled a couple dozen milk jugs with water and several 5 gallon buckets. None of that helps after a cloudy windy day, of course, but it does help on still nights after sunny days. The back wall and 1/2 of the east and west walls are just tin and the roof is just tin, so there is NO insulation. I am wishing we had insulated those areas. The front wall and 1/2 the east and west wall are large glass windows and the front roof is polycarb. It is big enough that the earth itself heats it for quite a while into the winter.

BixbyM - thanks for the photo showing your onions and peppers, helps to visualize.

Dawn, you must start thousands of seedlings to be able to plug them in when others are ready to be replaced. Do you grow transplants of most everything? Squash, cukes, melons too?

Where do the seedlings live while they're waiting their turn?

When I start seeds early (or not so early), the seedlings often grow faster than I expected. I have a hard time keeping them healthy until I can plant them out. My seedlings usually live in the house until I start to harden them off. When the weather is warmer, I keep them outside on a screen porch.

We've had weird weather this year - temps in the 70s and 80s in late March and early April so I was confident that winter was over. Then the temps dropped to freezing and it snowed last Saturday. I don't remember an April snow in this part of VA - ever. We were in Ft Worth so I'm awfully glad my little guys were safe inside the house.

Starting thousands of seedlings is time-consuming too. I'm trying to get a mental picture / movie of how your system works - and no doubt, it DOES work well.

Pam, I do start a lot of seedlings and, oddly, I don't really have a formal plan. One day my mind will just say "you'd better start the _____ seeds now (fill in the blank with whatever it is that day or week)" and so I do it. Some how it all works out.

My indoor light shelf in the spare room holds 12-15 flats depending on the size of the flats. When I want to move plants out of the spare room, they can go to the unheated greenhouse, garage, potting shed, porch or sunroom. Or onto tables on the patio, but I cover those with bird netting if left out 24/7 so that possums and other night-roaming creatures don't climb up onto the tables and eat the plants. The general path the plants travel is from spare room light shelf to greenhouse (which is covered year-round with 50% shade cloth) to shaded patio to tables in full sun to the garden. I don't keep a formal list and say "okay, that's a week in the greenhouse, now outdoors to harden off more in shade.....I just wing it. Somehow it works.

My system works because I've done it so long that it is just automatic and I don't even think about it. My subconscious mind must keep track of things and just tell my conscious mind what to do. Right now it is saying 'OK, your cucumbers are up, it is time to start seeds of watermelons', so tomorrow I probably will.

Our weather has been crazy and I've felt like Alice in Garden Wonderland because everything is so mixed up. We have had warm season reseeding annuals sprout at the same time as cool-season reseeding annuals, which is insane. Usually the warm-season ones don't start sprouting until the cool-season ones already are in bloom. That's just one example of the craziness.

Another is that the asparagus starting producing harvestable shoots in January. January! Normally that mostly happens in mid- to late-March, though a warm spell in late February occasionally starts some of the asparagus early. And, it was backwards....usually the purple asparagus is earlier and the green asparagus is later, and this year it was the opposite. This totally defies logic and I don't understand why it happened. And, now the asparagus is finishing up far too early, but we have harvested it for about as many weeks as we do in a normal year---just that the harvest started much earlier than usual. The broccoli has headed up and I'll begin harvesting any day now. The cabbage is heading up, but it takes longer to form heads so it will be a while yet. The collards are huge. I've been having trouble keeping up with the timely harvesting of lettuce, spinach, kale and collards because the heat has made them enlarge abnormally quickly. The early tomatoes in pots have produced two ripe red tomatoes so far, and several more are turning. Usually the first tomatoes are at the end of April. The lettuce got really big really quick and some of it already is trying to bolt, which I blame on a few days with 88-degree highs. However, I have plenty more lettuce plants in flats to plug into bare spots in the garden, so I can yank out some of the lettuce that is trying to bolt. I usually plant leaf, iceberg and romaine for early lettuce and Summer Crisp types for later season lettuce, so none of my SummerCrisp types have gone into the ground yet, though some will be companion-planted with tomatoes tomorrow. I was going to do that today, but it was cool and rainy so I stayed inside and potted up small peppers into larger paper cups.

The onions also have loved the early warmth and are the size now that they usually are in mid- to late-May, making me think my little pepper plants are going to be lost in there amongst the gigantic onions when I finally start plugging them into that bed.

This week's cooler, wetter weather is a blessing in disguise as it enabled some angry, uncomfortably warm, stalled snap pea plants to relax, grow more and bloom. I was starting to worry the hot weather would get them before they could produce peas. My bush bean plants aren't that old or big, but already have buds and will flower any day now. I don't think we've ever harvested bush beans in April, but it looks like we will this year. I really feel like I fell down the rabbithole and woke up in somebody else's garden.

Since late January, I have felt like the garden is running straight ahead, pell mell, right into summer and I am running behind it trying to catch up with it. I just hope all the early warmth isn't a sign of a terribly hot summer to come. I worry that the transition from El Nino to La Nina will be very quick while I'd prefer a slow transition, or even better, a transition from El Nino to neutral conditions instead. Of course, we'll get whatever we get, and we'll just deal with it.

All the early warmth didn't mean we escaped late cold nights, but we certainly had fewer late cold nights than we do most years. I never really feel safe until around May 4th (because May 4th is the latest late frost we've had here).

Y'all must have gotten out of Ft. Worth just in the nick of time as a horrible hail storm, with hail stones up to the size of softballs (though most of the big ones were "only" golf ball to tennis ball sized) blew through a couple of days ago and damaged northern parts of the DFW meteroplex. It was awful and the video is incredible. One similar storm came very close to us, but sort of went around us and hailed on one county north of us and another northeast of us. As a gardener, hail is my worst weather fear.

Dawn

Thanks a million, Dawn.

I think I get it. Don't overthink it. Pay attention to the weather and to growing conditions. At some point in the past, we've experienced similar conditions. I've noticed that you draw parallels to years that were especially difficult and to very good years. You look for warning signs and you take steps to minimize damage (bird netting on the tables).

If we make a mistake, it won't be fatal. We learn more from our mistakes than from our successes.

You are an incredible teacher. Thank you.

PS - El Nino is still going strong. Sea surface temps are almost as warm as last fall and we are moving into the warm season. The climate folks changed their predictions for La Nina, now say she may arrive in the fall or next winter. I don't think they know what to expect, truth to tell.

Pam, I try not to worry too much about El Nino/La Nina at this time of year because of the spring predictability barrier. We'll know soon enough what will happen. (grin)

In my bones, I feel a La Nina coming and I don't like it. I hope I'm wrong. Our weather this year has been all over the place in Oklahoma with some areas very, very dry and that worries me. When we are dry in the spring rainy season, I take that as an omen.

I noticed earlier this week the Australia BOM has issued a La Nina watch. I haven't checked online today to see what the latest update is from the American authorities.

BOM ENSO Update

I imagine if the Australian authorities are seeing signals that a La Nina is coming, then the USA weather folks probably are seeing similar data.

Dawn

I hope you're wrong about La Nina too! The climate people seem to agree that people in the southern part of the country, West Coast, and Alaska will have warmer than normal temps and higher than normal precip for next 3 months, maybe longer. http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/90day/fxus05.html 

When I read the predictions, I realized that different scientists use different models so they are not always in agreement. Your instincts are probably more valid. I need to plant a ton of seed. Nature abhors a vacuum. I haven't planted much outside yet so am in a big battle with weeds.