Yes

myluck, I was going to say that my DH also likes to weed, but I think he used to like it more than he does now. (g) It's relaxing if you can keep up with it but when you fall behind, it can be a little much. Oh, thanks for reminding me of 'Royal Burgandy' beans. I used to grow those religiously and haven't for a few years. I couldn't find them one year. Then I tried pole beans and I did find a purple one called 'Trionfo Violetto' which are very good too. I'll have to try those again. I haven't tried 'Jet Star' either. I have less than full sun and cherry tomatoes do better for me. 'Sungold' or 'Sunsugar' cherry tomato is my family's favorite. 'Marconi' pepper has been the best pepper producer for me so far. I buy starts for the warm season vegetables, because my garden is pretty small. This year they were out of 'Giant Marconi' and they offered me something they said was a real producer. It was a dud. 'SugarSnap' Peas are very easy and trouble free and very sweet and crunchy. 'Parris Island' Romaine Lettuce. I've tried a couple of other varieties and have come back to that one. 'Waltham Butternut' squash has performed well for me. A lot of tried and true varieties. When I want to try something new, I usually take a look at the reviews on Cornell's Vegetable Varieties site. I'm trying to preserve tomatoes. I'm thinking of making up some spaghetti sauce tomorrow with some of them and freezing that. Here is a link that might be useful: Cornell Vegetable Varieties

I have just gotta try that spinach overwintering thing, sometime! It never even occurred to me until, I believe it was, David pointed it out here. I can testify that lettuce won't overwinter. An out-of-the-way bed was sown with lettuce, bok choy and fun jen last year. I was planning on an October harvest but only got a little bok choy. Of the 3, only the bok choy survived a very mild winter and it bolted immediately to seed at the first sign of any warmth. Leafy vegetables respond really well to nitrogen, Mstywoods. It might be this way: a lot of the nitrogen is in the plant's chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is mostly in the leaves and responsible for photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is responsible for plant growth. That's why you can get in trouble with too much leafy growth and not enuf fruiting, if that's what you are hoping for in a plant. Early in the season, leaf and general plant growth is what we are trying to get for every crop. Early fertilizing for everything probably always makes sense. Of course, we don't want lettuce to fruit. But, I find that growing lots of greens improves my garden soil generally because I give them lots of organic fertilizer. ("Lots" by definition of my Organic Gardening Encyclopedia). They grow quickly and then they are gone. About half of my lettuce is gone and the sweet onions are growing into the space where those rows once were. I find that those 2, especially, are good together in a bed. Organic fertilizers persist in the soil for more than 1 season. Even tho' this kind of fertilizer is expensive, it amounts to "money in the bank" because it stays around for awhile. . . . just my 2¢'s worth. (And, a reminder to myself NOT to plan on cultivating every square inch of the salad garden in October. Gotta leave some room for spinach that I'll have to remember to sow about the 1st of September . . . First of September? Does that sound about right?) Steve

Pam, I do start a lot of seedlings and, oddly, I don't really have a formal plan. One day my mind will just say "you'd better start the _____ seeds now (fill in the blank with whatever it is that day or week)" and so I do it. Some how it all works out. My indoor light shelf in the spare room holds 12-15 flats depending on the size of the flats. When I want to move plants out of the spare room, they can go to the unheated greenhouse, garage, potting shed, porch or sunroom. Or onto tables on the patio, but I cover those with bird netting if left out 24/7 so that possums and other night-roaming creatures don't climb up onto the tables and eat the plants. The general path the plants travel is from spare room light shelf to greenhouse (which is covered year-round with 50% shade cloth) to shaded patio to tables in full sun to the garden. I don't keep a formal list and say "okay, that's a week in the greenhouse, now outdoors to harden off more in shade.....I just wing it. Somehow it works. My system works because I've done it so long that it is just automatic and I don't even think about it. My subconscious mind must keep track of things and just tell my conscious mind what to do. Right now it is saying 'OK, your cucumbers are up, it is time to start seeds of watermelons', so tomorrow I probably will. Our weather has been crazy and I've felt like Alice in Garden Wonderland because everything is so mixed up. We have had warm season reseeding annuals sprout at the same time as cool-season reseeding annuals, which is insane. Usually the warm-season ones don't start sprouting until the cool-season ones already are in bloom. That's just one example of the craziness. Another is that the asparagus starting producing harvestable shoots in January. January! Normally that mostly happens in mid- to late-March, though a warm spell in late February occasionally starts some of the asparagus early. And, it was backwards....usually the purple asparagus is earlier and the green asparagus is later, and this year it was the opposite. This totally defies logic and I don't understand why it happened. And, now the asparagus is finishing up far too early, but we have harvested it for about as many weeks as we do in a normal year---just that the harvest started much earlier than usual. The broccoli has headed up and I'll begin harvesting any day now. The cabbage is heading up, but it takes longer to form heads so it will be a while yet. The collards are huge. I've been having trouble keeping up with the timely harvesting of lettuce, spinach, kale and collards because the heat has made them enlarge abnormally quickly. The early tomatoes in pots have produced two ripe red tomatoes so far, and several more are turning. Usually the first tomatoes are at the end of April. The lettuce got really big really quick and some of it already is trying to bolt, which I blame on a few days with 88-degree highs. However, I have plenty more lettuce plants in flats to plug into bare spots in the garden, so I can yank out some of the lettuce that is trying to bolt. I usually plant leaf, iceberg and romaine for early lettuce and Summer Crisp types for later season lettuce, so none of my SummerCrisp types have gone into the ground yet, though some will be companion-planted with tomatoes tomorrow. I was going to do that today, but it was cool and rainy so I stayed inside and potted up small peppers into larger paper cups. The onions also have loved the early warmth and are the size now that they usually are in mid- to late-May, making me think my little pepper plants are going to be lost in there amongst the gigantic onions when I finally start plugging them into that bed. This week's cooler, wetter weather is a blessing in disguise as it enabled some angry, uncomfortably warm, stalled snap pea plants to relax, grow more and bloom. I was starting to worry the hot weather would get them before they could produce peas. My bush bean plants aren't that old or big, but already have buds and will flower any day now. I don't think we've ever harvested bush beans in April, but it looks like we will this year. I really feel like I fell down the rabbithole and woke up in somebody else's garden. Since late January, I have felt like the garden is running straight ahead, pell mell, right into summer and I am running behind it trying to catch up with it. I just hope all the early warmth isn't a sign of a terribly hot summer to come. I worry that the transition from El Nino to La Nina will be very quick while I'd prefer a slow transition, or even better, a transition from El Nino to neutral conditions instead. Of course, we'll get whatever we get, and we'll just deal with it. All the early warmth didn't mean we escaped late cold nights, but we certainly had fewer late cold nights than we do most years. I never really feel safe until around May 4th (because May 4th is the latest late frost we've had here). Y'all must have gotten out of Ft. Worth just in the nick of time as a horrible hail storm, with hail stones up to the size of softballs (though most of the big ones were "only" golf ball to tennis ball sized) blew through a couple of days ago and damaged northern parts of the DFW meteroplex. It was awful and the video is incredible. One similar storm came very close to us, but sort of went around us and hailed on one county north of us and another northeast of us. As a gardener, hail is my worst weather fear. Dawn