Forgot to mention in my first post, I live in a north-facing apartment with no balcony and close to zero direct sunlight. The windows (bay windows that are 1.5m in height) are unobstructed and huge though, so I thought I could install several permenant lights on the ceiling, and use them for several hours each day to make up for the minimum light requirement for some greens. I do have a lux meter and have read about Daily Light Integral. For growing leafy greens, I think I can get away with about 12-14 mol/day. I get about 5-6 mol/day just from the diffused north window light. So I figured if I switch to artificial lights when the sky starts to get dark, I could make up for the extra 6-8 moles needed. To be honest, I went for metal halide floodlights, because they can be installed on the ceiling and still provide enough lux at approximately 1m distance. With fluorescents, I'll need to add a rack in front of my window and have the lights placed very close to the plants (which will also block out the diffused window light). I just thought MH will work better in my situation.

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

Mike, There are many reasons. The main reason is that different varieties are not just different named versions of the same thing---they have different flavors and other different qualities. I love green beans, but I don't want to eat the same green bean all summer long. I want different flavors and textures. Some varieties do not work well at all for freezing or canning, but others do. So I can or freeze the varieties that can and freeze well, but eat fresh the varieties that don't preserve well. Some of it is a hedge against the vagaries of weather. Different varieties perform differently in various types of weather. With a lot of different varieties, you increase the odds that you'll get great production from at least some of what you plant. I rarely have a year that is a true dud with very poor production. I believe that is partly because I hedge my bets by planting so many different varieties. Different colors of produce are, to me, the spice of life. Why eat only red-fleshed watermelons when they also are available with white, pale yellow, bright yellow, pink, orange and even swirled/mixed colors? If we're having a bowl of melon balls to eat as a light dessert after dinner, why can't it include red, yellow and orange melon balls? Maybe with a cantaloupe or honeydew thrown in? It isn't just about looks of having a wide variety of harvest times, flavors and texture either. As a cancer survivor of many years, the nutritional content of what I grow is very important to me. Remember that different colors of skin, flesh, leaves, etc., come from different phytonutrients, phenols and other compounds and for the best, most well-balanced diet, nutrient-wise, we should try to eat a wide variety of foods in many different natural colors. That is one reason breeders are working to develop blue tomatoes---to help us get more anthocyanins in our diets, for example. Scientists have found that different antioxidant compounds are associated with the phenols and other compounds that produce different colors in produce. So, if you eat a wide range of different colors of produce, you're getting a wider range of natural antioxidants in your diet. I also just really enjoy having a colorful garden. For some reason I cannot explain, it gives me great joy to bring more colors of produce into the house. I am perfectly content to carry a bucket of green podded snap beans to the house. However, when I carry a bucket of mixed green, yellow, purple, pink, red and bi-color beans to the house, I am almost giddy. I feel the same way when I have a bowl of tomatoes on the counter. Red ones are fine. However, a bowl of black, purple, pink, yellow, red, orange and bicolored tomatoes is not just a bowl of tomatoes---it is a celebration of the biodiversity that is found in tomatoes. Maybe for me, that's really what it all comes down to---celebrating the biodiversity that exists in Mother Nature. When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, I knew (or thought I knew) what vegetables looked like---tomatoes were red, eggplant was purple, corn was yellow or (if you grew your own, white), carrots and pumpkins were orange and celery was green. Why were they that way? It wasn't because only those colors of those vegetables existed in nature. It was because long ago the commercial growers, agricultural breeders. marketing folks and others involved in the production of and sale of produce decided that was how it was. After I began growing heirlooms and discovered that vegetables come in many colors never seen in the grocery store, I wanted to grow them all. I think that selectively choosing only certain colors of produce probably doesn't do us any good nutritionally. When I select different varieties, I always have my eye on their DTMs. For example, I don't want to choose bean varieties that all produce is 60 days. I want some that produce in 50, 55, 60, 65, 70 days, etc. Too many green beans at one time can be a problem. Spreading out the harvest over a longer period of time works better for me. As a bonus, when you have kids who might not be big fans of veggies, they can be tempted into trying yellow or red carrots, yellow or orange cherry tomatoes, purple broccoli, pink green beans, etc. It doesn't matter if the kids are your own children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews, the children of friends or whatever....if you can get them to try new veggies or fruit they normally shun because they "don't like vegetables" then you've just done them a favor. With regards to buying seeds of different varieties, I try to carefully research varieties before I buy them. I want to know that people who have tried them before me found them worth growing for some reason--flavor, disease tolerance, heavy production, drought tolerance, etc. I look for varieties known to produce well in hot summer climates and known to tolerate pretty wide swings in temperatures and moisture levels. It is very hard to know what ones to buy. When I first started gardening here, I mostly grew the same varieties I'd grown in Texas 80 miles south of where I now live. That worked out pretty well, so Willhite Seed Company has been my go-to seed supplier because it only carries seeds that do well regionally. With a lot of seed suppliers, you have to know if they are a nationally-oriented retailer or regionally-oriented. With some of the regionally-oriented suppliers, I have found that if there region is very different from ours, their varieties might not do as well here. The more I got into growing heirloom and open-pollinated varieties, the more I have gravitated towards a handful of suppliers whose varieties have repeatedly grown well here: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, Bountiful Gardens, Victory Seeds and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. With Baker Creek, I have to be careful because some of their tomato varieties haven't done well for me. It is the same with Tomatofest. I avoid the big retailers who have seed racks in all the stores. Why? Because their seeds are chosen because they will grown well in the majority of the USA. Well, Oklahoma's weather is not necessarily like the weather in the majority of the country, so hybrids developed to do well in the USA at large may not do well here in our hot, dry, miserable little niche. I hope this answers your question, and we can discuss it further if you have more questions or comments. One last comment, and I sure this will not surprise you....when we collect eggs from our free-range chickens, we don't just bring white eggs into the house. Over the course of the year, we will bring in eggs that are white, light brown, dark brown, brown with darker brown speckles, olive green and pale blue. Biodiversity exists in the world of chickens almost as much as it exists in the garden. You'll never find a carton filled with only white eggs in my fridge! : ) Dawn

Bon, Home-made seed tapes work just fine. You can find instructions all over the internet. Just be sure you let them dry thoroughly before you put them up to await the day you plant them. If you put them up wet, the flour/water paste can turn moldy. You can use newsprint (not the glossy inserts), paper towels cut in strips, toilet paper, etc. Rodney, It is nice to have you visit us from the land of ice and snow. I hope our endless conversations about the early arrival of warm weather (it arrives every week, stays a few days, and then turns cold again) doesn't make you too crazy. Spring may arrive early here sometimes, especially compared to how late it arrives there for you, but then the cold nights keeps coming back and coming back and coming back. I'll had the temperature go down to freezing when tomato plants were knee-high to waist-high and covered in fruit. Last year, we harvested our first tomatoes on the last day of April (from plants protected on cold nights with frost blanket type row covers), sliced up that tomato, made BLTs and enjoyed every bite. That night or maybe the next night, we had our last freezing temperature of the year. By then, I had tomato plants that were 4' tall and loaded with fruit. C'mon now, is that normal? Nope, but we have to deal with whatever wild, crazy ride the OK weather brings us in any given year. So, while we talk of planting early, we also have to protect plants relatively late. What a terrific grow list you have! I would have thought you'd have idea conditions for the brassicas and for potatoes. Even here, potatoes do well most years, but if we fail to harvest them in time, the heat and humidity can make them collapse into a soggy, rotted mess some years (not necessarily all). Bon, I agree with Rodney. To my taste buds, garlic tastes like garlic. I like it all and never have had any I haven't liked. Today's weather-related surprise (Rodney, you should skip this little announcement of mine if you love asparagus and if the thought of us harvesting it now is going to make you crazy): this afternoon, while working in the garden, in 70-something-degree heat, I harvested the first asparagus spear. I washed it off, pinched off the tip that had been in the ground, broke it in half, and Tim and I stood there and ate that tender, yummy taste of spring. We both were shocked. I am pretty sure we've never harvested asparagus in early February before. I'm not even sure if we've ever had any to harvest in late February. March is more typical. This needs its own thread, and maybe it will get one later, but here goes. Today, at the Wal-Mart in Gainesville, TX, across the Red River from us, they had all kinds of veggies. All kinds. Including tomato plants and a handful of pepper plants. It is far too early for tomato plants--even Gainesville's average last freeze date surely cannot be much earlier than mine (March 28th) and far, far, far too early for pepper plants. So, what's a gardener to do? Especially when their own tomato plants are just tiny sprouts? Yep, I did it. I bought one of each variety they had: Big Beef, Early Girl, Celebrity and Sweet 100. They were in small (maybe 3 or 4") round peat pots. I repotted them into gallon pots and they are sitting on a shelf in my mudroom. I was going to put them in the unheated greenhouse but we're headed for a low in the 30s tonight more than likely, and I had left the doors open all day until sunset so there was no build-up of heat to keep them warm. It is likely that the first tomato we harvest in April will come from one of these plants. I hope the folks at that store remember to cover up the plants this weekend when we're expected to get pretty close to freezing. And for anyone in my neck of the woods wondering if the Wal-Mart in Ardmore has any tomato plants in the store, they did not, as of yesterday. Usually Gainesville gets them at least a week or two before Ardmore does. Oh, and we had to go across the road to the Gainesville Home Depot to get something Tim needed. I made a beeline straight to the garden center and they had the exact same tomato plants and pepper plants that Wal-Mart had, as well as all the cold-season veggies and herbs and tons of flowers. After he found what he came for, he had to come drag me out of the garden center because I was going to stay out there with all those plants all day.