I'm still deep in the research period on what to grow. I think we'll be planting about 8-900 square feet so we should be able to include a good variety.

I've been told squash is problematic. Although I really wanted some zucchini, we may skip it, or grow it separate from our main garden if it is so bug prone.

We definitely want tomatoes, bell peppers, a few chiles, okra, egg plant, potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, radishes, off the top of my head. Probably a few more veggies.

In addition, we may also try a salad garden which I'll really have to put in some time figuring out. From what I understand salad greens require much less direct Sun so it will either have to go somewhere else or we will have to partially shade that area of our main garden. I'd love to grow spinach, romaine, and a few of the more nutrient dense greens. I eat a large spinach salad almost every day. It would be nice to eat it from my own garden for once!

Oh, sugar snaps would be nice if we can pull it off. I know our heat can be a factor. If there are any particular cultivars good for this area please tell me, I'm open to suggestions!

I have grown the sugar snap and super sugar snap peas from Burpee seeds and plant them mid-February. We get a decent amount of production before it gets too hot. However, they never make it inside the house, my kids love picking and eating them. At times I have had to stop them so they do not ruin their dinners.

Most of your cool-season crops (potatoes, carrots, onions, lettuce and other salad greens (including spinach) and edible podded peas can be planted (per OSU's Spring Garden Planning Guide) from February 15-March 10. For radishes, the recommended planting dates are March 1 - April 15 ,and the best way to plant them is to succession sow by planting a certain number of radishes every week during that week. That will spread the radish harvest out over a longer time frame since you can only eat so many radishes per week and don't need or want the whole harvest at once.

Potatoes will be your tallest cool-season crop, unless you plant vining edible podded peas, so they should be planted in the northernmost part of your garden to keep them from shading out everything else. If you plant a vining form of edible podded peas, like Sugar Snap or Super Sugar Snap, then their trellis also should be on the northern side of your garden plot so they do not shade shorter plants. I'd have them north of the potatoes because they'll reach 5-7' in height, and potatoes won't get quite that tall.

Carrots can be slow to sprout and often the soil crusts over and it can become hard for the tiny carrot plants to break through the crusty soil. One way to get around that is to sow a radish seed in the same rows as the carrots, placing a radish every couple of inches. The radishes will end to germinate more quickly and break through the soil's crusty layer, paving the way for carrots to follow them. Since some radishes mature in just 3 or 4 weeks, you pull them out once they are mature, and the smaller carrot plants gradually enlarge and fill the void left by the harvest of the radishes.

Lettuce and spinach are strictly cool-season veggies that will bolt once the air and soil temperatures reach a certain point. Bolting is partly a function of dry soil as well as being temperature-driven, so keeping the ground they're growing in evenly moist can help prevent bolting to some extent. Some lettuce varieties withstand our heat better than others. You should mostly ignore those litle blurbs on seed packets or in seed catalogs that describe one variety after another as being "heat tolerant" or that say "produces all summer". That may be true of cooler climates where the folks think it is insanely hot when temperatures hit the 80s, but it is not really true here where hot weather means 90s-100s and beyond.

Some of the lettuce varieties that have performed the best for me here include Anuenue, Australian Yellow Leaf, Jericho (a romaine lettuce from Israel), Red Sails and any of the oakleaf types. Batavia summer crisp lettuces probably are the most heat tolerant types I grow, and some examples of them are Cherokee, Cimarron, Crispino, Jester, Mottistone, and Red Ball Jets, With Spinach, I often grow Bloomsdale Longstanding and Teton. Sometimes hot weather makes them bolt pretty early, but then you can grow them again in the fall and winter. It is not too early to get your lettuce going. If there's anything I like to plant really early, it is lettuce because all too often we heat up way too early in the year, so I'm always in a race to grow as much lettuce as I can before the heat sets in and makes it bolt.

My early lettuce plants are in tall containers (so that if rabbits sneak into the garden in winter, the plants are elevated higher than the rabbits can reach) and already are about 5-6" tall. I'm getting ready to sow the seeds of the summer crisp types into a cattle trough on legs this weekend, which is a method I use to grow them near the house (far from the fenced-in garden plot) and keep them planted high enough that rabbits cannot eat them. I have hoops over the top of the catle trough and generally drape bird netting over the hoops to keep the turkeys, chickens, rabbits and cats from getting into the cattle trough and eating the lettuce. I often have trouble with wild birds, which are very plentiful here, pecking away at the early lettuce because there's just not a lot of green platns available to them at this time of the year, so row covers or bird netting help protect them.

With your edible podded peas, you can grow vining types or shorter bush types, depending on whether you want to erect a trellis or whether you have a fence they can climb or not. I generally plant Sugar Snap and Super Sugar Snap on a trellis (made of T-posts and woven wire fencing, so I can move it from one raised bed to another every year). For a shorter bush type, I really like Cascadia. Sugar Lace or Sugar Lace II, and these get about 30" tall, produce heavily and are disease-tolerant. They are, however, basically leafless (so they can put all their energy into producing peas, not leaves) so if you want to grow edible podded peas partially so you can use the young pea shoots in salads, then Sugar Lace isn't the one you'd use for that purpose.

Because potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes and peppers all are in the nightshade family, they can be affected by similar pests. I like to plant the cool-season nightshades at the northwest end of my garden, where a pecan tree will partially shade them beginning in mid- to late-afternoon, and I plant the warm-season nightshade family plants as far away from the cool-season nightshade family plants as I can. This is because the pests get a head start on the cool-season plants and then can easily move to the warm-season nightshade plants. By putting some distance between them, I keep my warm-season nightshades a little safer from attacks by pests already on the cool-season nightshades. I usually grow my tomatoes and peppers together in the same raised bed, or in adjacent beds. When I grow eggplant (which I usually don't because we don't like it....but I did grow it back when I was trying to get us to eat enough of it to like it), I plant it as far away as possible from the rest of the nightshades because it tends to be a flea beetle magnet early in the season. I'd rather have the flea beetles to flock to it instead of having them all over the potatoes, tomatoes and peppers. When you use a plant like that to draw the pests away from other plants and towards it, that's called a trap crop. You're likely to have flea beetles on eggplants, so why not use them to try to keep the other plants flea beetle free? Keeping a distance between your potatoes and tomatoes also is good because that helps keep any Colorado Potato Beetles that might be on the potato plants from moving directly to the tomato plants later in the season.

I'll come back later and talk about your warm-season plants. I need to go finish making dinner and this is long enough as it is.

Dawn

Wow! That is great advice, I look forward to your next installment about warm-season plants.

I am beginning to understand how far behind the curve I am but that is OK, it is all about learning and getting better. I will do the best I can and then plan more and do better next year!

Just found this Site. These are plants to attract beneficials. Probably many of the same things Dawn mentions. Beneficials

Thanks! Such links will help hold me back from ordering books I probably don't need. I've grown lots of plants, my knowledge is pretty broad, I just need more depth in certain areas and, of course, much more experience. Well-reviewed books are so tempting though! BTW, I'm in Claremore, just down the road :)