Awesome update and suggestions. Thanks, Jay!
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Jay,

It is still hot and dry here and my plants are roasting. We have cooled down somewhat. It was only 107 here today, which doesn't sound very cool, but even 107 is better than the 110-112 we've been having, though not all that much better. They keep putting a nice cool 99 or 100 out there 3 or 4 days away, but then as that day approaches, the 99 or 100 goes away.....I guess that's the price we pay here for being so very far south.

Like you, I am pleased overall with how well the garden has done despite the heat, but we have been in the 110-112 range for at least a couple of weeks now, and I've stopped watering almost everything. When our temps are that high and our soil is as dry as it is, I cannot water enough to keep the plants producing so I stopped trying.

The cool-season crops were a mixed bag, with lettuce, onions and potatoes doing well, and everything else doing not so well. We were too wet for most things in February-April and too hot too early for most of them. The carrots produced pretty well despite a lot of cutworm issues but I'm moving them to the Peter Rabbit Garden next year to a raised bed with better soil.

Warm-season crops produced exceptionally well for the most part.

I planted most warm-season crops about a month early in order to take advantage of the very early last freeze and very early warm temperatures, and that strategy paid off.

Bush beans produced huge loads of beans by late April and early May, depending on the variety and the DTM, and kept me busy picking, cooking and freezing them. Summer squash produced huge loads from late April through last week. As soon as I stopped watering, they were done, done, done.

Pole beans produced moderately well, but the blister beetles and grasshoppers ate them down to bare stems in July, so they're done. I'd hoped they'd make it to fall, but since the pests ate all their leaves, that's not going to happen.

Pickling cukes produced very well, particularly in the absence of cucumber beetles which usually spread disease like bacterial wilt to them. Spider mites hit them hard, and I stopped watering them a while back and they quickly died. I was able to can many pints of pickles and pickle relish, so it was a successful pickling year. The Armenian cukes produced well until the temps being hitting 110 and I stopped watering. We had so many that I deliberately left many on the vines to get huge and I would harvest one or two big gigantic ones every day to cut in half for the chickens. By the time they were that size they were more like the true melons they are, and the chickens adored them. I think there is only one left on the last vine now, and I'm going to give it to the chickens tomorrow.I give the Armenian cukes a lot of credit with helping keep the chickens hydrated and helping them survive the 110-degree-plus heat on many days. Unlike last year when we lost a lot of chickens in the heat, they all have survive so far, which is a great relief.

Cantaloupes have been astonishing in their productivity considering how hot and dry it has been. We've harvested about 25 or 30 total so far and have another 6 or 8 that are likely to ripen before the plants die. There's a part of me that wants to keep watering them, but it is so hot that I don't know if they'd keep producing even if I did water them.

Okra has done well though it has wilted badly pretty much every day for the last 6 weeks despite being well-watered. I believe Jing Orange produced earliest, followed closely by Little Lucy and Mammoth Green, which I believe is a green velvet type with those really long narrow pods. Beck's Big Buck has produced the most pods per plant, and since the pods are huge (wide and fat), you can make a good meal off of just a few pods. Stewart's Zeebest seemed to stall in the middle of the summer but is producing very well now. I probably planted them closer together than I should have.

Watermelons are the best they've been in quite a few years. I grew the reliable mini-melons that set fruit well in limited space: Blacktail Mountain, Yellow Doll and Yellow Baby. Amish Moon and Stars perished in the Three Sisters Garden after I stopped watering it about a month ago. It has less-well-improved soil and just couldn't hold moisture. I'll work harder on that soil in the fall.

Winter squash is one of the few things continuing to perform well in the absence of water. We have 'Seminole' running all over the place, the Waltham Butternut has produced early and often, and one Cornfield Pumpkin is still hanging in there and doing well without irrigation. The 'Tahitian Melon' winter squash did well as long as it was well-watered, but has not done as well as the others in the absence of water.

Southern peas have struggled all summer because the pests have just eaten them back to the ground over and over. They are still putting out new growth despite the lack or irrigation or rainfall and trying to survive. We'll see how they do. The same is true of Lima Beans. My Fowler beans outlasted even Rattlesnake, though Rattlesnake did well until the grasshoppers ate all the foliage. The grasshoppers either didn't like the Fowler foliage as much or Fowlder rebounded more quickly because the foliage just kept growing and growing. Fowler set new beans until a couple of weeks ago, so it will be a regular in the garden now.

Peppers--fearing drought I went with a fairly conservation pepper planting and tried to put as many of them as possible in a new raised bed at the NW corner of the garden that would get shade beginning around 3 p.m. The jalapenos of all types and 'Chichen Itza' habaneros have produced loads and loads of peppers. I've frozen about 20 dozen roasted jalapenos for winter cooking, and still am picking a few dozen peppers a week. I've canned some and used a lot in salsa in addition to what we've been eating fresh. The sweet peppers have struggled with sunscald and also have remained smaller than usual,but they have produced in this weather so I cannot complain.

Tomatoes have produced better this year than in at least 5 or 6 years, being outstanding in every area--earliness, great fruit size, great flavor, huge yields and relatively little fruit issues like cracking. Some of the cherry tomato plants continue to bloom and set new fruit even in these temperatures, which is pretty amazing. Despite lots of spider mite issues and some PM issues when it rained heavily at the begining of June, the tomatoes thrived and I believe the spider mite numbers now are dropping so some plants outlasted them. There was a lot of Early Blight after the very late May/very early June rainfall, but most plants survived it, and the ones that did not already had produced heavily before I yanked them out.

The tomato plants in the containers by the garage are the only ones I'm watering and I am hoping to keep them going for fall. I'm fighting blister beetles on them, but may be winning that war.

The herbs have done well, with most of them being more heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant than you'd expect.

I grew decorative gourds on the garden fence and should have a dozen or two for autumn decorations. I'd hoped to have more, but there were in the dry Three Sisters bed and their foliage is wilting badly and I'm just hoping they are far enough along that they don't sunscald.

I've been working hard on my tomato grow list for 2013 while 2012 is fresh on my mind. Many of the new ones I tried this year were not winners, but a few were. I will focus on trying new (to me) types of paste tomatoes next year, having found a pretty solid lineup of beefsteaks, slicers and bite-sized ones over the years, but not such an engraved-in-stone list of paste types yet. The more time I spend processing paste tomatoes, the more I want to grow the really large ones. It is less work to process fewer, larger ones than tons of small ones, but the flavor has to be there or the size doesn't matter.

Yardlong beans grew and produced really well, but I am not as impressed with their flavor as I'd like to be so I may not plant them next year.

I started southern peas and bush beans for fall and have been watering them. They're under row covers to keep the pests off of them. They're looking pretty good considering the heat. I don't know if I'll keep watering them. It all depends on fires. If we don't have a lot of big fires in August that take me away all day every day like last year, I may be able to keep the beans and southern peas and container tomatoes going. If I get busy with fires, I may not. So far, the horrendous raging wildfires that have ravaged parts of our state are not happening here. Our fires have, for the most part, been pretty easy to contain. We are getting drier and drier by the day, so I am not sure if that will continue.

Overall, despite the tremendous heat and the abnormally dry summer, the garden produced very well. The limited amount of fruit we have produced very well and I'd like to plant more fruit for future years, but that will mean more fencing because the wild things like the fruit as much as we do. It is a great fig year, so for breakfast most days I have cantaloupe and figs. That has made it a memorably sweet summer.

Disease was only an issue when it rained, so I haven't had many disease issues.

Dawn