Gardening in Texas Is Mostly Planning Around August

Every gardening book I own was written for somewhere else. They describe one long season that starts in spring and ends in fall. Here there are two short ones with a furnace in between, and pretending otherwise cost me three years of dead tomatoes.

The useful reframe: August is not part of the growing season. It is the thing you plan around.

Two seasons, not one

Spring runs from the last frost to roughly the end of June. Fall runs from late September until the first frost. What sits between them is survival, not production.

• Spring: everything that fruits. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans. Planted early enough that they set fruit before night temperatures stop them.
• August: shade, water, and low expectations. Okra and southern peas genuinely do not care. Everything else is being kept alive, not harvested.
• Fall: the better season, and the one most people skip. Brassicas, greens, root crops, all going in while it still feels far too hot to plant anything.

The fall planting date is the one that feels most wrong and matters most. Seeds go in during the last week of August, in soil hot enough to be unpleasant to touch.

Plant for the heat you are going to get, not the spring you are standing in.

What actually survived

Three years of notes, compressed:

• Okra, southern peas, sweet potatoes, and peppers make it through unaided.
• Tomatoes stop setting fruit above about 92°F at night and resume in September, so spring varieties want to be determinate and early.
• Anything in a container needs twice the water you estimate and probably afternoon shade by July.

The part I still get wrong

Shade cloth. Every year I put it up two weeks after I needed it, and every year I lose something I did not have to. The calendar reminder now says the first week of June, which still feels early, and is not.