Oh, and Golden Puslane and Jewels of Opar (SESE) are very nice for summer salads. I have Yellow Cabbage Collards from SESE growing right now and surviving the heat. I had Egyptian spinach last year that I liked cooked. Bunny got it this year. I didn't care for regular amaranth leaves, but I may try Calaloo next year. The more I look at the garden, the more I think I need to be growing more "bang for my buck" tomatoes take up a lot of space, and most have not produced enough to justify their footprint. Next year I will start earlier, see if I get better production. But I think I will cut back on the number of plants. Greens - you can eat the whole thing. I have not grown enough lettuce this year.

I didn't realize you can eat JoP. It will take over my beds if I don't stay on top of it. Sure is pretty, though!

It is an interesting article, but I have to add that cold hardiness in Oklahoma is highly variable and I see better cold hardiness if we cool down gradually and then stay cold. In the years when we fluctuate too much in the winter from cold to hot back to cold again, some of the cold-hardy crops don't seem as cold hardy as they should be. I wonder if the weather in SESE's area is more stable than ours in winter or if it fluctuates as much as ours does some years? I think that in years when we have erratic, fluctuating temperatures, the plants don't get a chance to gradually build stronger and stronger cold tolerance.

I never grow enough lettuce, Amy. Or, we get too much at certain points (so I am feeding it to the chickens, which they adore) and not enough at other points. I like leaf lettuce and Tim likes iceberg, so it is easier to keep me happy, lettuce-wise, than to keep him happy---iceberg is slow and then too much of it tends to head up all at the same time. I eat lots of kale and he won't touch it.

There are some things that some people eat for greens that I won't touch! Just because we can eat it doesn't necessarily mean that the taste and/or texture will appeal to everyone.

In the fall/winter, with the use of a little row cover here and there, I can keep most greens going all winter, or at least until February. If February gets too hot too early, some of them will bolt earlier than they should.

I have grown a lot of SESE's greens over the years and pretty much all of them have done well here, especially the varieties from EvenStar which I grew around 2012-13. This year I changed things up and am growing a lot from other companies, just to change things up a bit. I still have a bunch of greens seeds left from those years, like curly cress and garden cress and some of the kales, but I don't know how good their germination rate would be by now.

These are the cool-season varieties I've started for fall, or will direct seed at the appropriate time (which will be some point in time when the high temperature is not 100+):

Beets: MacGregor's Favorite (grown for the greens), B.I.'s Gourmet Blend (for beets)

Broccoli: Purple Peacock, Summer Purple Sprouting

Brussels Sprouts: Red Rubine, Jade Cross

Cabbage: January King,

Carrots: B.I.'s Calliope Blend

Cauliflower: B.I.'s Chef's Choice Blend (consists of Snowball Y, Green Macerata, and Purple of Sicily

Collards-Kale hybrid: Groninger Blue

Kale: Dazzling Blue, Redbor, Russian Red, Scarlet

Lettuce: Great Lakes (iceberg), B.I.'s Mesclun Mix (leaf lettuces)

Mustard Greens: B.I.'s Must-Have Mustard Blend (a blend of Red Giant, Tendergreen, Mizuna, Ruby Streaks and Spicy Green) and Purple Rapa Pop Mix

Radish: Easter Egg Blend

Rutabaga: American Purple Top, Joan

Spinach: Monstrueux de Viroflay

Turnips: Golden Globe

I'd like to plant more, but with a ton of winter squash growing and lots of summer plants still producing (even though I do keep yanking them out on days it isn't too hot too early in the day), there's not enough space available for more.

Today the heat index hit 99 by about 10 a.m. so I didn't stay out as long as I would have liked. At the rate I'm going on removing the summer plants lately, the fall plants will need to grow on slowly in paper cups for a while because there won't be roon in the ground for them for a while yet.

Dawn, have you grown Monstrueux de Viroflay spinach before? That caught my eye, too. Although, I'd have a heck of a time fitting that name on a label!

I finally got some mache to grow, but miner's lettuce has refused to grow for me (and it's a weed, too, right?) I have mixed feelings about the taste of bok choy. I like Yokatta Na. But I guess I could grow the ones I have seeds for to give the chickens this winter.

Nowyousedum, Jewels of Opar is a relative of purslane and supposedly the leaves are good tasting even when flowering (what more could you ask for? Pretty and edible!) It is not quite as "succulent" as purslane. I will plant more next year. The Penny Rile southern peas are trying to overtake everything in that bed.

Amy, Yes I have, and it does get pretty large. It does better for me as a fall plant than as a spring plant (it bolts too quickly in our erratic spring weather). I just label it MDV.

I've been yanking out cowpeas this week. They traveled from their side of the bed and grew up the lima bean trellis, so taking them out is slow and tedious, but I need that bed for fall crops. They and the lima beans intertwined and created a big mess. I have to cut them out of the trellis bit by bit. I do believe that they'd take over the world if I let them. As I take them out, I strip them of the peas and beans, and have to fight the bees that are visiting the flowers and who (especially the bumblebees) are very unhappy that I'm removing the plants. My most vigorous southern pea has been Haricots Rouge Burkina de Faso. I believe they would grow from here to the moon and back.

Lol, another long name added to my things to try list. How's the taste of that HRBDF?

It is good but it is more strongly flavored than pink eye purple hulls, more like the stronger flavor of a crowder pea. They also make a very dark juice---dark brown. The flavor is excellent. I haven't eaten many of them on their own, though, because I had six southern pea varieties all producing at the same time for much of the summer, so when I picked them and shelled them, I generally left them all mixed together in a gorgeous array of colors and sizes.

I do not think that any other cowpea I've ever grown (including Penny Rile and Red Ripper, which are very prolific as well) has been such a vigorous and prolific grower and producer as HRBDF. I suspect it would practically grow and produce in concrete. Nothing bothers them. They just outgrow any pest that nibbles on the leaves (grasshoppers and blister beetles have eaten a fair amount of the leaves, but the plants just put out seemingly two new leaves to replace every pest-devoured leaf) and they laugh at the heat and dry conditions. I do water them though.

Next year I want to plant them in the back garden and let them climb the 8' tall fence. This year they were restricted to several feet of ground between their planting row and the adjacent trellis in what had been an onion bed. They crossed the ground, climbed to the top of the 5' trellis, cascaded back down to the ground and then started climbing again. If I left them in the ground until frost, they'd probably keep producing non-stop, but there's only so many cowpeas we can eat and the freezer is already pretty full. I suspect they'll self-sow and come back next year because the plant growth was so dense and crazy all summer that I'm sure I missed some peas that fell into the mulch and will overwinter and grow next year.

I was worried that there would be too much of the Dixondale onion fertilizer left in the ground and that I might get all leaves and not many peas. That was not a problem at all. The HRBDF (from Baker Creek) is about as bulletproof of a plant as I've ever grown in my garden. I think they've earned their way onto my list of toughest plants, the one I describe in this way "it won't die and you can't kill it".

I also grew Aunt Violet's Multicolored Lima Beans, which produces beans in many colors. I mixed them with Sieve when harvesting and cooking, so they also were an astonishing array of colors in one dish. I bet my family wonders why we can't be like everyone else and just have plain old purple hull peas (which are green as shellies, of course) or plain old green lima beans. lol. That's not how I roll. I'm all about diversity in the garden, and this year, even in the cooking pot and the dish.

I choose my varieties for drought this year, since it seems inevitable that drought years follow El Nino years. Next year, drought and heat tolerance likely will be even more important as we move further away from El Nino, so HRBDF will be on the 2017 grow list for sure.

LOL, "it won't die and you can't kill it" means it won't grow for Amy. My Penny Riles are trying to take over, so better than that would be lovely. I think they say the more color and more color variety, the better the nutrition. I've never liked lima beans. Maybe if I grew them they'd be better.

nowyousedum(7a) wrote "I didn't realize you can eat JoP. It will take over my beds if I don't stay on top of it."

... What's JoP?

I'll buy seeds of some of the recommendations above. I live in a cold sunny climate and have an unheated solar greenhouse. Last winter, I planted these things on Sept 21 while the greenhouse was not yet enclosed, and then covered the greenhouse in early November after a few light frosts without damage:

Arugula produced prolifically earliest of all and bolted before some others were even ready to eat. It was very sharp though.

Mustard greens and dwarf kale produced well all winter, mustard a little earlier than kale. I cook these most of the time, but also put raw in sandwiches.

Claytonia sprouted a bit slowly but turned out to be extremely delicious. I'd never even seen it before, but had read Eliot Coleman's recommendation in The Winter Harvest Handbook, and ordered the seeds. It's great as a salad green.

Dragonhead (Dracocephalum modavica), a lemon-flavored herb that is common in my region, grows great in the winter and turns out to make a super-sweet combination when eaten with claytonia. It's also a vigorous reseeding volunteer, and sprouts in cold weather. Great raw or cooked, but especially raw with claytonia.

Napoli carrots were also recommended in Coleman's book, and were sweet and fresh when I pulled them in Feb, when the greenhouse was starting to get hot in the daytimes. Great raw.

Mache (also on Coleman's recommendation) didn't sprout after more than a month so I transplanted kale to that bed, and mulched it heavily, so I don't know if the mache tried to sprout later.

Dill volunteers all over my greenhouse and puts on a spurt of germination after the cold weather begins.

Lettuce, strangely, took months to germinate but finally did well in the spring.

All my herbs turned yellowish and stopped growing in the winter: chives, mint, oregano, lemon balm.

HighColdDesert, Amy said something about the leaves of Jewels of Opar (JoP) being tasty.

I've been saying I grew mache last year, but never got claytonia to grow. I realized today it was just the opposite. I FINALLY got claytonia to grow this spring, briefly. I swear last year I found an article that said to plant mache on Labor day. I looked for the article today and didn't find it.

I grew mache in a hoop house in southern Oklahoma and it was delicious. I think the seeds have to be fresh.

I think the seeds do need to be fresh as they lose viability quickly like lettuce seeds do. When I grow mache, I have to sow it indoors or wait until October because our soil does not cool off quickly enough to make it happy. When sowing it indoors, I still have to pre-spout it in the coolest room in our house, because our AC normally does not keep our house as cool as they mache would like. It germinates best in soil temperatures of about 58-65 degrees. It will germinate more slowly at soil temperatures as low as 41 and as high as about 68 degrees. At a 70 degree soil temperature, mache seed remains dormant and won't germinate. If seed is sown in soil that is too warm for it, it normally will germinate once temperatures drop down to the right range, assuming the seed doesn't rot, get eaten or wash away/blow away first.

No place in my house is cooler than 70, LOL. Here is the article that mentioned Labor Day. She's in the Pacific Northwest. No doubt that's too early for us. I did read somewhere that you could interplant with onions because it would be done before they bulbed.

The only room in our house that might possibly be that cool is the downstairs half-bath, which sits on the north side of the house right in the middle of the house, so the rooms on either side of it take more of a hit from the heat than it does. If I keep that bathroom door closed and have the AC set on 70, it sometimes builds up enough cool air to be cool enough for seed germination. Sometimes not. The men in this family don't like having to step around a flat of seedlings on the floor in order to go into that room, but they do it without complaining too much.