anne - based on the many posts I have read over the years on the Tomato Forum, the general consensus for SoCal growers (and other southern U.S. growers) is that they plant in February/March and are usually done with the crops by now - this due to a climate where it is either overcast (coastal - "Gray May", "June Gloom") or way too hot (inland), and thus there is litte chance for getting much successful fruit set at this time of year outside of certain varieties. This actually allows for 2 growing seasons there, where seeding for a fall crop is beginning about now and those tomatoes can be planted out in August/September/October for an October/November/December harvest. I expect getting used to this type of planting when coming from a temperate area, will take time!!!

I just planted fifty Texas Sweat Onions in the same 25 gallon pots along with my newly planted fruit trees. I bet they both thrive. What tcstoehr said about not coving the graft unions is correct. You can still use raised beds. Just keep the trees out of the raised beds by building around them. Will the trees try to send roots into the raised beds? I think they will. However I have seen many, many, many amazing raised bed gardens surrounded by and intermixed with both fruit and shade trees.

If the idea is to save money, and especially if you're doing containers, I agree that herbs are your best bet. Potatoes and squash won't save a lot of cash. Okra and eggplant might be good bets. I especially like the latter because they produce well through the hot summer. Tomatoes and peppers turn off in the fiercest months of heat, though you might get a fall crop. Summer greens? Well, they say that they are "heat tolerant", but that phrase has a different meaning in Texas than elsewhere, and I haven't had a lot of success nurturing at least kale in July and August. Of course, if you're planting in June, we're talking about harvest in September and beyond, so it's mainly going to be about survival.

authereray, I wasn't offended, I was joking back! So, no apology necessary. I don't remember why I didn't like watermelon rind pickles as a kid---maybe too much cloves, but I have a total aversion to both watermelon rind pickles and pickled beets so I avoid them at all costs. Maybe it was just that my young taste buds didn't like them, but I do not feel inclined to try them again at any age. (grin) I don't imagine they are all that different from the cinnamon pickles that I made last month, which are mostly just cucumbers, vinegar, sugar, red hots and cinnamon sticks, so maybe it is just the idea of eating watermelon rind that never has appealed to me? Rebecca, If kept well-watered and well-fed, eggplants laugh at the heat. In the years I grew it (back when I thought that if I grew it and cooked it, I could convince my family to like it---and I was wrong about that!), even after I gave up in the midst of extreme drought and stopped watering the garden, the eggplant often kept on producing on no irrigation and no rainfall for weeks and weeks so I think it is pretty hot tolerant. I have been busy with yanking out old plants, a very time-consuming task when the garden is a jungle and everything has grown together into a big mass of plants, with an occasional snake thrown in, and Tim is on vacation so we've been working our way down a long to-do list that has been interfering with my computer time! We did have a fire yesterday, but it was only a small one and I didn't go. I was standing by at the station and ready to take them drinks if they needed it, but it wasn't a long fire or a bad one. It was, however, a very smokey fire because wet, green grass was burning, which is an indication of how dry we are here, isn't it? Hazel, My tomatillos usually don't start making fruit until sometime in August. Many, if not most (but not all) tomatillos are daylength sensitive so they don't start making fruit until the number of hours of daylight drop down to a certain point, which normally occurs in mid-August at my house. Mine have flowered since April, are constantly visited by bees but stubbornly refuse to set fruit until the day length gets short enough. I expect they'll start setting fruit within the next couple of weeks and, based on the size of the plants, there should be a lot of fruit. After the squash bugs hatch, the eggs look the same for a day or so only with a hole at the end where the bug emerged. Sometimes they seem to sink in a little bit like a partially deflated balloon. If you saw eggs and nymphs on the same leaf, then the nymphs likely had just emerged from the eggs. I still remove the eggs and drop them into soapy water in case there is an egg or two left in the cluster that hasn't hatched yet. I've been really successful this year at finding and killing squash bug, stink bug and leaf-footed nymphs that have just hatched out that day. I spray them directly with Safer Insecticidal Soap. It doesn't kill them all, but the survivors (being young and stupid) only hide for a little while and them come back out onto the leaf surfaces and then I see them and spray them again. That is usually all it takes to kill the young ones. Old ones are much harder to kill. There's too many leaves now for me to search the back of each leaf for eggs, but I check the plants for nymphs daily with the bottle of insecticidal soap in my hand or sitting close by. Usually they all cluster together on the same leaf or two if they are newly hatched, so they are easy to spot and kill. I snip adults in half with a pair of scissors that I wear on a lanyard around my neck while scouting for pests each morning. Then, I go back out in the afternoon and check the same spot for any more survivors or any that may have hatched nearby. If you have well-established squash plants, then this late in the season it is unlikely the squash bugs can harm them, but if you've got new plants started for fall, the squash bugs are a threat to the new plants. The best reason to control them now is to prevent them from building up a big population that will overwinter and get your plants next spring. Since it is now August, I'm going to go start the August thread, so the garden talk can continue into a new month. Dawn