Planning the Fall Garden

We are in the midst of a heat wave right now.  Temps are in the upper 90's.  It seems summer is clawing and scratching and trying to hang on for as long as it can, not wanting to give up without a fight.  At work our Safety Guy sent out the following email this morning:

"We've been spared the excitement of Hurricane Dorian as you all know but the high pressure system that is protecting us brings in a new challenge: increased temperatures.
Over the rest of the week, the high temps are forecast to be in the upper 90s to triple digits. Add in the humidity and we are looking at 112-115 adjusted temperatures.
As bad as this is, our folks have now been operating in the heat for 4 months now. As we talk about in our meetings, our bodies and brains are tired due to prolonged heat stress.
Take extra precautions this week with our people. Make sure our drivers are reminded to hydrate and make sure personnel in our warehouse are drinking lots of water.
Ensure we have adequate supplies of water and ice. It isn't a bad thing to buy a couple of bags of ice.  Let's put some proactive leadership out and make it through the end of this summer without any incidents.
Contact me if you need anything."

Even though summer is on most everyone's minds, fall is just around the corner.  This weekend, I was looking at my seed inventory for both fall and spring crops and decided to make a small order to fill the holes in my inventory, as well as to try some new crops:

I was looking at my LSU AgCenter Vegetable Planting Guide.  It lists the following dates for planting  certain crops I'll be planting for the fall garden:

Snap Beans                 8/10 - 9/10
Beets                           8/15 - 10/1
Broccoli                      7/15 - 9/1
Cabbage                      7/1 -   9/15
Carrots                        9/1  - 11/1
Cauliflower                 7/1   - 9/1
Swiss Chard               8/15  - 10/30
Garlic                         10/1 - 11/30
Lettuce                        8/15 - 9/30
Sweet Peas                  3/1  - 8/10
Spinach                       10/1 - 2/28

I'll plant a few more items, but those are my mainstays.  I'll be planting most of those in seed pots this week and they'll be transplanted into the garden a little later once they're established.  I have a lot to do in a very short time!  I'm doing things a little differently this year.  First I'll be harvesting sweet potatoes in a few weeks.  The sweet potato vines have taken over the entire garden.  Once I dig those up, I'll have room to plant the seedlings, which by then will be ready to be transplanted into the garden soil.

This year I won't be pulling up rows.  I'll plant the seedlings directly into the garden.  We'll be completely no-till this year.  Once the seedlings are established, I'll mulch around them deeply with wood chips.  So far we have had 12 truck loads of wood chips delivered!  We barely have any room left to put them, but we'll keep getting it and find somewhere to put it.  The wood chips will retain soil moisture and hopefully make weeding the garden a less taxing task.  We like to experiment.  We'll see how it goes and will report our successes and failures with the "Back to Eden" gardening method.