I wouldn't hesitate to plant cowpeas. I'm still planting some beans too, and squash. Just put in another 85' or so of sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are still a very viable option.

George
Tahlequah, OK

I just started some pickling cukes on my pea trellis since the heat finished them off and I hate to see an empty trellis. Im also about to sow more corn. I started some July 4th tomatoes since they have a short DTM. Ill plant them out in a few weeks. Pulled the onions to make room for more squash or cool season stuff when its time for those.

mike

I planted 9 more sweet potatoes a couple of days ago. I planted cowpeas on the 17th. I just finished pulling my winter onions, I will use that spot for something else till fall, and then replant. I still have about 100 Superstar onions to harvest.

Larry

I've planted cowpeas in 4 different areas, once a week for the last 4 weeks, and I intend to plant some this week and then next week. They are a great succession crop. With one raised bed of onions, after I took out onions that were bolting or whose neck were being snapped by the wind, I stuck tiny watermelon plants in the open areas. Over the weeks, those plants have spread and now have lots of baby melons on them. They looked funny at first, almost like a tiny ground cover plant, but as the onions continue to finish up (5 varieties in that bed, and each came out at a different time), the watermelon plants spread and filled in nicely. Those plants will continue to spread and fill a lot of the first bed where I grew onions. At the other end of that long raised bed, I just harvested the last onions (Red River and Highlander) this weekend, and stuck winter squash seeds into the ground to fill in that area. I had previously planted a late crop of hot peppers in the other raised bed where the short day onions had grown. They are just now getting big enough to start blooming.

While cowpeas are my go-to succession planting crops at this time of the year, I also often succession sow more pickling cucumber plants when an open spot is available in the garden, or succession crops of yellow summer squash and zucchini under floating row covers.

I just bought three chile pepper plants yesterday to fill in one little bare spot at the end of a row of pepper plants because I only had planted jalapeno, habanero and poblano peppers, and my son was hoping I was growing chiles. So, now I will be.

If you want to grow eggplant, pepper or tomato plants for a fall harvest, they can go into the ground any time between now and mid-July in our part of Oklahoma (7b) and still have plenty of time to produce before the first frost. Of course, the issue may be how to get them through the July heat, but drip irrigation and shade cloth helps a lot with that.

You can plant winter squash or pumpkins for fall, but since it already is Squash Vine Borer and Squash Bug season now, their only real hope of survival is to grow them underneath floating row cover or tulle netting to exclude the pests.

I usually plant pole or bush beans in July (pole) or earliest August (bush) for a harvest in Sept/Oct. We have so many grasshoppers devouring our spring-planted beans that I am not expecting a harvest from those plants which are being stripped of all their foliage by the hungry grasshoppers. If I cover young mid-summer planted beans with row cover, I should be able to get them established and then eventually uncover them after the grasshopper population peaks and begins to decrease.

Some years I've planted muskmelon and cantaloupes in late June and had a harvest from them beginning in latest August or early September. They seem to grow at an incredibly fast pace from seed-sown into warm ground in hot weather.

We're buried under an avalanche of tomatoes and I am harvesting and canning, freezing and dehydrating as fast as I can and I am starting to regret planting so many. I can't wait to finish up all the canning and start yanking out tomato plants over the next few weeks so I can replace them with new crops for a fall harvest.

What I try to do at this time of the year is just to ask myself what we want more of, whether it is for fresh eating or preserving, and that is what I plant. If we're having the kind of year where I feel like we have plenty of everything, then I generally sow some more herb seeds, sow some more cosmos and zinnia seeds for the butterflies, and grow some stuff just for fun---like luffa and birdhouse gourds, mini Jack-B-Little and Baby Boo pumpkins for fall, gourds or Indian corn for fall decorations, etc. If there really isn't anything we need or want, I sow a cover crop, usually iron-and-clay cowpeas at this time of the year, for soil improvement.

In a year like this where some rain continues to fall in June, the sky is the limit when it comes to succession planting. Of course, rain needs to keep falling in July and August so the succession plantings have a chance to survive the heat. We got about a half-inch of rain early this morning, so today, at least, it feels like anything is possible in the garden.

Dawn

Bush, pole, cowpeas, anasaki

We haven't had a lot of sun so my carrots are not all full. I did get a few this week.

cukes, zukes and more yellow squash and winter squash

Germinating tomatoes, eggplant and bell peppers, banana and poblano peppers, broccoli, brussel, cabbage, cauliflower, and seeded for more carrots

I am still trying to get okra and squash planted. Then when I get back from vacation, Ft. Worth here I come, I will be intensely getting ready for fall. Whatever I can get in the ground, lettuces greens carrots beets. Oh and definitely more swiss chard.
Dawn glad to hear you got some rain too.
kim

I just dug up my potato bed this past weekend so now I have room to plant some okra. What's a good companion plant for okra? I also wanted start some more basil seedlings so I can freeze a bunch of pesto for the winter. I still need to figure out what to put in place of my bush beans and few onions that are left when they all come out. Otherwise, I don't have any room left in the garden.

Anyone have experience with fall potatoes? My kids are loving our homegrown potatoes and they said I should grow more. Can I use my just harvested potatoes as potato seeds? I see that OSU recommends planting August 1st-15th so I have at least a month.

Cynthia

I am underplanting my okra with squash. A lot of squash since I left my seed packs in the rain again!
maybe that the trick to getting rain here just leave my seed bucket out.
kim

I sure appreciate it, Kim!

Any time...
I will have to buy a lot of seed next year tho but hey its worth it right!
kim

I often underplant okra with refrigerator melons like Sugar Baby, Bush Sugar Baby, Yellow Doll, Yellow Baby, etc. The plants are fairly compact but cover the ground well and help keep it cool, and the okra plants help shade the enlarging melons and help prevent the melons from getting sunscald. Likewise, I have grown muskmelons and true cantaloupes beneath okra, though my usual way of growing those melons is to trellis them.

Fall potato plants will grow and will produce some potatoes but normally do not produce as heavily in fall as in spring. I suspect it is because they are a cool-season crop and when we plant them in summer, it is just really hard for them to take off and grow well until the weather cools off significantly. Then, when the weather finally does cool off, freezing temperatures are not too far behind, and that is the end of the potato plants.

It can be tricky to get just-harvested potatoes to sprout and grow only a month or so after being harvested. Normally they need to be dormant for a while, which in potato language means they need to be exposed to some cool temperatures between the time they are harvested in June and the time you want to plant them in August. Unfortunately, we are kinda short of cool temperatures at that time. One method recommended that may encourage recently-harvested potatoes to sprout for new plants in the fall is to store your intended seed potatoes at 50 degrees for 3-4 weeks. That might be doable if you have access to an old, "extra" refrigerator you can keep at 50 degrees for just that purpose. We saved our son's small dorm-sized refrigerator from his college years and it is perfect for various horticultural uses like this.

Dawn, unfortunately, I don't have an extra fridge. I'm assuming the regular fridge is too cold for the potatoes. I do have some store bought potatoes that are sprouting, so I think I will experiment with those.

It looks like any large vining plant will grow well under okra. I do have seeds for Sugar Baby and Yellow Doll watermelons. I'll plant those since my kids love watermelon so much.

Cynthia

Thanks for the response - since I didn't get a good production from cowpeas the last 2 years, I'll try the weekly plantings. Last year the wasps seem to enjoy the blooms so I had to use row covers.
My place is in Lincoln County and the rainfall seems to fall off at the Oklahoma county line, but can't complain yet.
I'll try winter squash also.

Southern peas are wasp magnets, but I just leave the wasps alone and they leave me alone. I have a friend who is terrified of bees and wasps and hates to set foot in my garden because it always is full of them both.

I wonder why your cowpea production has been down the last 2 years. I assume they flower just fine? I did have blossom drop on cowpeas at some point in 2011 and 2012, but don't remember it being a problem last year. It has to get pretty hot for the cowpeas to fail to set peas.

I understand about the rainfall. I sit here in Love County and watch storms moving across Texas right toward us....and when the rain is about a county away....like it has reached Montague or Cooke County, TX, you can watch it on the radar and the storms just evaporate and don't make it across the Red River. We joke about there being an invisible glass wall there that stops all the rain on the Texas side. Today I kept an eye on the radar all afternoon as storms moved across Texas, seemingly headed our way, and we did get dark clouds, oodles of thunder and some wind. Fort Worth flooded. Some of the storms were headed our way for hours....just creeping their way across the radar screen ever so slowly. So, what happened? They hit that glass wall. We did get 0.01" of rain. Yippee. A whole one-hundredth of an inch. Just imagine how much that rainfall helped the garden. Or not. When someone who received rain asks us how much rain we got here, it is easier to say "it doesn't rain here" than to describe our measly .01 or .05" that we got while they were getting inches of rain.

I am looking for something to replant after a rabbit ate two full rows of newly sprouted bean seed. It was strange, the rabbit ate two rows completely to the ground, and ignored another two rows that were closer to the fence. I could not figure out how he got in but we have since found and repaired a hole in the fence.

I am trying to decide whether to plant more beans (will need to get more seed) or cowpea seeds we saved from last year. I don't really know how to cook cowpeas well, so maybe beans would be more useful.

Sorry to hear about the rabbit disaster. We have many around our house, too.

Cooking the cowpeas well is simple, and it is so simple even a cave man could do it. We'll teach you how, and then you'll want to grow lots of them.

Why not plant cowpeas from your saved seed since you have it? Cowpeas will produce better than beans in the August heat. If you replant the beans now, you may or may not get a good yield in August. Our mid- through late-summer heat can cause the same blossom drop issues with beans that it causes with tomatoes, so I usually focus more on cowpeas in mid- and late-summer, and plant green beans in mid- to late-summer for a September/October harvest.

As for the rabbit? I've given up trying to figure them all. All I can say is that you are lucky it didn't eat all 4 rows. I haven't had an animal breach our garden fence in ages, but yesterday afternoon I opened the gate and walked in and found an armadillo hole in the pathway right inside the entry arbor. Eventually we found the spot where he had made entry so that we could repair it and prevent future armadillo expeditions.

The last time a rabbit got into the garden, it ate exactly one nasturtium plant, and it barely ate that. It nibbled all around the stem just above the ground and then left the almost perfectly intact plant lying on the ground. I couldn't find any other plant missing or chewed, and the rabbit was still in the garden, so maybe I had interrupted its activity before it could eat anything else.

I think there's a barrier at the state line that's keeping the storms the last couple days from crossing over into Oklahoma. I watched yesterday as the northern half of a storm crossing the Texas panhandle completely dissipated as it hit the state line, leaving only the southern part. Now it's doing it again. I guess the rain is over and now it's back to normal.

I never did plant anything to replace the onions I pulled. I guess I should do that. Probably southern peas.

Leslie

Where are you finding sweet potato slips for sale this time of year? Thanks!

They had been available by mail order from Duck Creek Farms and Sandhill Preservation Center. You can check their websites, but by this late in June, it is likely they have stopped shipping for 2014.