Dawn, I read somewhere (I think) that your tomatillo plants aren't producing yet and that is normal. I grew some last year and this year too. Plants have blooms (did last year too) but never made fruit. I just thought it was the weird/wet weather last year. So...have you (and anyone else) found it better to plant them for the fall? Maybe I should order some seed. I used up all of mine for starting them indoors in the the late winter. Do you plant them directly in the ground for fall? Or start them indoors?

Okay. Your post was very helpful. I have three tomatillo plants that I didn't kill as seedlings. They are tall--not 6 ft yet, but nearly 5 ft. They do have blooms and have for awhile. However, they are planted right next to the tomatoes and they got aphids, like the tomatoes, and white flies too, but not near as bad. I did make the mistake of spraying them with that homemade soap spray that was used on the tomatoes...and, of course, that burned them. They don't look great but are still hanging in there.

They are Tomato Verde Tomatillo from Southern Exposure. Maybe I'll order a different kind and start some indoors and outdoors and just see what happens...cause I have a lot of time right now to try experiments. (not really).

What's everyone's favorite broccoli? I would like to have some success with that. I had an almost success two falls ago.

I have these seeds

Calabrese, Aspabroccoli F1 (not impressed), Piracicaba (produces sprouts, not big heads, but I just harvested one last night! And it over wintered last year and made sprouts in spring.), purple sprouting (you plant in fall for spring harvest, cut and come again sprouts, not heads), Early Green (got fall heads last year), Green Magic (have not grown this one yet)

Early Dividend and Pacman are supposed to grow well here, but Parks was out of Pacman when I ordered and the other was a company that sells through Amazon and I chose not to buy it.

My best harvest of regular broccoli was six packs from Lowes in fall of 2014. I don't know what kind they were. I like the sprouting broccoli, because it doesn't seem as finicky as regular broccoli which can "button" if things don't go right. Also, my favorite this spring was the buds off bolted collards. I ate them raw I liked them so much, but just as good steamed or stir fried.

Here is an old discussion on fall broccoli.

While we're at it, here is the fall carrot thread Garden Divas

Fall peas. I've tried 3 times. With regular English peas, snap peas and snow peas. Not good fall harvests on any of them. I've gotten reasonable harvests on spring peas started in TP rolls, until they get mildew. Any tips? Or is it just too hot and then suddenly too cold?

It could be that it is too hot and then too cold, but it just depends on the year. I've never had fall peas produce as heavily or as long as spring peas do in a hard year, but in the occasional year when the first freeze is really late---like in mid-December instead of mid-November, they can produce pretty well. You also can get pretty good production from a short variety like Cascadia or Sugar Daddy, which stay short and put more of their energy into producing peas instead of vines.

For broccoli, it depends on what you want. Packman is great if you want a fall or early winter harvest, but if you want a prolonged harvest throughout the winter and into early spring (with the help of row covers on very cold nights), then you want one of the varieties bred with very long DTMs like the ones in the Fall/Winter section of the Territorial Seeds webpage. I have quite a few broccoli seed packets in my seed box (if my memory is correct) and haven't even thought about which ones I'm going to plant. I think I have a purple sprouting type, Packman, Sun King, Bonanza and Romanesco. Maybe I'll plant a few seeds of each. I'm further south than most of y'all so I don't have to have my mind made up just yet.

I have 2 tomatillos that produced 4 fruits and I guess that is it until fall. However they may outgrow all their next door tomatoes.

thanks for the fall planting guide, Dawn. Started potting up today.

I am making my list. Are most of these assuming starting from seed, or transplants?

The OSU guide has the type of plants assoiated with the dates. Most will be seeds, but things like broccoli and brussels sprouts are transplants in the ground. I have never mastered linking pdfs to these posts, or I would link OSU's fall planting guide. I think a google search would bring it up.

Cochise, You're welcome. I have two tomatillos that have swallowed up a nearby tomato. Sometimes that happens. I also have Swiss Chard plants luxuriating in the shade of the tomatillos because I planted it north of them. They are the happiest, best-looking Swiss Chard plants in my garden and they only ended up there because I ran out of places to plant them, so is a happy accident that worked out well.

Rebecca, Here's the OSU Fall Garden Planning Guide:

Fall Garden Planning Guide

The guide has detailed info on whether they recommend starting from seed or transplant and in some cases they specify either will work, and I'll tell you now that when planting for fall, I prefer transplants. Sometimes the ground is so hot that some seeds won't germinate well, if at all, when sown directly into the ground. I use Tom Clothier's Vegetable Seed Germination Related to Temperature page from his website that shows the percentage of seeds that germinate at each temperature as a guide to help me decide whether to direct-sow, and I use a soil thermometer to check my soil temperature at planting depth, though my first soil thermometer was just a kitchen meat thermometer and that worked well for many years.

Here's Tom Clothier's vegetable germination page:

Soil Temperature and Seed Germination

If you are sowing seed directly into a container, you need to take the temperature of the soil in the container, as containers often heat up more then grade-level soil since the container lacks the cooling effects of the earth, and the more sun the container receives all day, the more the soil heats up. Almost all my containers are placed in morning sun/afternoon shade to keep the soil from overheating on hot summer afternoons.

With most types of plants traditonally planted from transplants, you need to start the seeds 4 to 6 weeks before the date they go into the ground. You can grow your transplants indoors or outdoors. I prefer to germinate the seeds indoors and then move them outdoors to grow on in sunlight if I can because that gives me transplants already adapted to the light and heat and means I won't be spending a week hardening off seedlings. However, raising transplants outdoors in this heat can be dicey because flats of small plants can dry out quickly. I can do it because I'm home all day and can water the flats mid-day if they need it, but for someone who works away from home, it may be safer to raise the seedlings indoors and spend that week hardening them off. Or, it can work to raise them on a porch or deck in morning sun but in shade the rest of the day. That way the plants get some sunlight but are not so exposed to full day-long sunlight in July or August that they struggle to survive.

I want to add that while we often can get away with planting late in Spring and still eventually get a harvest, we are less successful if we plant warm season plants late in fall because the warm season fades too quickly. I do often plant cool season plants late for fall, usually because planting time will arrive in August and it will be 105 degrees and I'll decide I just am not going to put a little transplant into the ground on a day like that. You can get away with planting cool season plants late in the fall garden as long as you're prepared to cover them up with row cover when cold weather threatens. I also prefer to transplant in the cool of the evening which gives young transplants the overnight hours to recover from being transplanted before they have to face the daytime sunlight and heat.

Amy, To link documents, this is the method that works for me. I position my cursor where I want the document to go. Then I click on "New Page" and pull up the document I want on a new page. Once it is there, I click on the URL at the top of my computer screen and copy it. With the URL copied, I close the New Page and it goes away, returning me to the forum page. I click on the "link" icon below, paste the URL into the link box, and give it a name on the line that says Text to Insert. Once that is done, I click on the box in the link page that says "Insert". This makes your link, under the words you typed into the Text to Insert Box pop up wherever the cursor was positioned. You'll see it there, but you cannot open it until after you have hit the Submit button. Once you have submitted the page and it has posted, then you can click on your link to see if it is there. That gives you a chance to verify that the insertion worked. To make life easy, I keep commonly used links in my bookmarks, so that once I have clicked on New Page, I can then click on my bookmark list and quickly find the document I want. This is quicker than doing a Google Search to find whatever I want to link, althought that works fine too. I know that you can master adding links. If I can do it, anyone can, because I am totally inept at virtually everything that requires computer know-how. I am pretty sure it was my old buddy, Gone Fishin' (may he RIP) who taught me how to link documents on Garden Web back around 2005 or 2006, and my computer know-how probably hasn't advanced one iota since then.

Dawn

My problem is pdfs. On my tablet, they don't open in the browser and I end up with yet another version saved to my storage and I still have no url to copy because the tablet opens them in an app. I can't put pdfs on facebook either. I can try copying your link, which, if I hold on the link brings up a menu that includes "copy link address", so I could then continue the link process. I have not been successful doing that on search pages, I end up with 15 versions of the pdf downloaded to my tablet. I will have to ask my kids to show me what to do.

I'm making my list, too. My first fall garden was 2 beds. Last year it was one bed with extra plants stuck in random open places. This year it is 3 beds. I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

I'm not overly fond of pdfs either as they often don't link or open properly, and I do end up with tons of them downloaded to my laptop and never seen again. Hmmm. I wonder where they are. Well, maybe I don't want to know.

My problem with the fall garden is that the summer beds just won't stop producing and I hate yanking out stuff that still is producing a good harvest. I end up planting most of the fall garden late for that reason. It isn't hard to get new tomato plants in the ground after taking out the old, but after that, it is a struggle to make myself take out anything. I am going to make more of a concerted effort this year to yank out the old and plant the new. I planted southern peas earlier than usual this year in the hope that they'd finish up earlier and leave open space for fall plantings. I think that might be working, as the first ones that set peas are really slowing down now, and spider mites are beginning to show up on them.

The summer squash plants worry me because they just won't die. (Ha! The irony of having them still alive being an actual problem does not escape me.) I planted yellow summer squash in three succession plantings of 3 plants each. In a year when the squash bugs and SVBs don't show up, no one needs 9 squash plants in production all at once. However, since there's so many years when I have to fight a pitched battle for every single squash we harvest, there's no way I'm going to remove squash plants that are highly productive. It is early yet and the squash pests also could show up and kill them overnight. So, I keep harvesting squash and blanching/freezing the excess for use later on in cooking. That means 3 separate areas that normally would be available for fall planting are not yet available.

When I harvested this morning, I looked at all the areas that are still too green and too productive to be replaced with fall plants, and urged those plants to hurry, hurry, hurry and finish producing so that I can use their area for something else. The plants did not seem amused. The lima beans are going totally crazy. They were planted on a 6' tall trellis that is about 40' l ong but are not content to climb to the top of it, so they have cascaded back down to the ground and are crossing the path and climbing all over tomato cages that still contain productive tomatoes. Every day I pull the rampant bean vines off the tomato cages and zip tie them to their trellis to keep them there. By the next morning, new runners are headed out into the pathway so they can cross and climb the tomato cages. It is almost not funny, but it does give me the giggles when I see it because the lima beans are just so relentless. Not to be outdone, some southern peas that should be bushy are planted in a row directly south of the lima bean trellis. They started out about 3.5' from the trellis. Now they are climbing it. In some cases the lima bean foliage cascades down and the southern pea foliage reaches up and the vines meet and intertwine. It is just a big mess, but a big, wonderful and highly productive mess. I almost had everything sort of topped/tip-pruned to keep it under control but then we got that 2" of rain and new growth exploded everywhere.

At least the cucumbers are cooperating and are dying back quite rapidly now. They have had some bacterial wilt and a lot of mosaic virus for weeks and weeks now, but since County Fair is highly tolerant of bacterial wilt, the plants resisted it for a long time, only losing a part of a plant here or there very slowly. Finally it has spread quite a bit, and I am ready to yank them out, but spent too much time harvesting this morning to yank out the cukes.

I have been yanking out tomato plants to make room for more fall plantings, but have a long way to go. I need to hurry up and yank out more, but today there's enough ripe tomatoes for at least 8 canning batches, so the rest of the day must be focused on canning. Maybe tomorrow morning I can yank out some more tomato plants and that will (a) reduce the canning load and (b) open up space for the fall garden plants.

Dawn

Well, I'm ready for fall. I have started pulling tomatoes out, and am hardening off fall tomatoes to plant. Some were grown from seed, and some I cloned (propogated from suckers) from favorite plants. I have fresh cucumbers, zucchini, and yellow squash all in the ground, and am going to start some more seedlings to keep it going for awhile. I've canned so much salsa at this point, that I don't want to can anymore right now, enough pasta sauce for my own use, tomato sauce for my own use, and I've put up so many quarts of tomatoes, bags of onions and peppers in the freezer that I've lost count. I'm enjoying the pickling, though, so I want to keep that going. All my peppers are healthy and big and producing like crazy. I suspect they will survive right on through until frost. They always do. I've done candied jalapenos, bread and butter jalapenos, spicy bread and butter pickles like Wickles) , spicy dills, etc. I sent my oldest daughter to work with some of the bread and butter jalapenos (Dawn, it was your recipe), and now people are requesting them. I haven't sent her to work with Salsa yet, and that's probably a good thing. If the fall tomatoes do well, I may do another batch or two of Salsa. I am going to start some broccoli, cabbage, and a few other things tomorrow or Sunday. I have been assessing my space (or lack of it), and may try to find a way to stick in a wide row of Texas Cream Peas. Although I'd like to grow a lot of leafy green veggies, nobody but me will eat it. I'll grow some anyway and share it with the bunny, I guess.

Mary, It sounds like you have had such a great gardening (and food preserving) year and are on track for it to continue on into fall. Way to go!

The little bunny who was living in my garden disappeared a while back. I'm hoping he or she just voluntarily left one day when the gate was open for the chickens. I don't think a bobcat or anything came into the garden and found it because I haven't found any rabbit fur or body parts lying around.

I've been working on getting the old tomato plants out too so I can put in the new ones. I am on a somewhat later schedule for fall planting since I'm so far south, and that's okay with me because on some of these recent July days it has been too hot to think, much less to get up, move around and work. I am dreading next week's even hotter weather, but I just sowed seeds indoors of broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale and other cool season crops indoors, so that gives me something I can grow indoors while I'm avoiding the heat outdoors.

I have a definite southern pea problem. Of the 6 varieties planted, only two have petered out. The others should be finishing up by now but they just refuse to quit. This is interfering in my plan to plant zipper and lady peas for fall because I don't want to have to spend all day every day just shelling peas. The lima beans also are hanging in there and producing better and for longer than I expected. One day I may just have to yank them out anyway so I can use their space for something else. The pole beans are slowing down a lot in this heat, and that's a relief. There's already all the beans we could possibly want or need in the freezer so I may not plant any for fall. I could save my fall souther pea seed for next year as it is fresh seed this year so has several years of good viability left.

I'm over tomatoes. Period. This week I haven't even been enthusiastic about eating them, except for SunGolds I pick and eat what working outdoors. I guess my canning burnout has spread to the eating of tomatoes. Maybe I'll perk up and get over tomato fatigue now that the salsa-making is done. I also think I'm through canning and freezing tomatoes in any shape, form or fashion. Peppers should keep me busy through the rest of the summer and well into autumn.

Despite a lot of wind and rain at the wrong times, hot weather when it should have been cold and cold weather when it should have been hot, the garden has been very productive. Just imagine how well we'd be doing if the weather had cooperated?

And then there's the squash. Because of squash bugs and the diseases they carry and squash vine borers and the death and destruction they cause, it is rare to have a year in which there is too much squash. With no squash pests here, we're getting a bumper crop of squash. I'm not complaining. I'm just baffled that the pests haven't made it to our garden yet. I guess at some point I'll remove them because I have other plans for the space they occupy. This always is a fall garden problem---just getting the summer stuff out of the way to make room for the fall stuff.

Dawn

Looking at the forecast for the rest of the month, I'm just afraid that it's going to stay too hot for too long for things to grow well. I know it's too hot to put in cilantro seed right now, parsley too.

I stupidly set out my broccoli and cabbage seedlings when it was too hot. Gotta start all over again. I get what I get ...

Next week's weather does look quite daunting. Our local TV met (who has a very high degree of accuracy) says we are likely to get even hotter than the NWS is saying. He thinks 102-104 for max highs by this time next week for at least some of the Texoma viewing area. I'm hoping he means that 102-104 for someone else, like maybe further west of us, because I don't want those temperatures here. We have had rain-cooled air, mostly from rain falling near us but not on us, for the last couple of days and are starting to get spoiled. Yesterday we were in the 70s for much of the morning hours and I think we only made it up to 96 degrees, which was an improvement over what we'd been having. It still is awfully hot for young seedlings at 96. Overnight last night we got at least 4 degrees cooler than forecast, and with rain to our west, we might stay unusually cool for a few hours this morning.

I know I am going to have to bite the bullet and just start taking out productive plants, probably this morning, in order to clear the way for fall plantings. It is the hardest thing in the world to pull out plants that are green, healthy, happy and producing, but I'm going to do it anyway. I keep telling myself we don't need all the beans and peas that are producing, but it can be so hard to get them in summer's high temperatures, especially the beans, that I kind of hate to end their lives prematurely when they are doing so well. That always is the dilemma with planting a fall garden, though, and sometimes the gardener just has to bite the bullet and move on.

Bite the bullet! That compost pile is moaning, Feed me.

I will, but it goes against the grain to take out plants that are deliriously happy and producing. Sometimes, though, it is necessary.