'Zephyr' is a straightneck summer squash. 'Zephyr' has a yellow stem end and is pale green at the blossom end. Faint white stripes run the length of this squash. (Learn more about summer squash click here.)

Zephyr is a cross between the Delicata and yellow Acorn squashes with a slightly crooked neck about 5 to 8 inches (13-20 cm) long. You can harvest 'Zephyr' at about 4 to 6 inches. 'Zephyr' is a firm, sweet-nutty flavored squash perfect for quick cooking

Grow. 'Zephyr' is a warm-season hybrid, has an open form or habit, and is ready for harvest about 54 frost-free days after sowing. (Learn more about growing squash click here.)

Choose. Select 'Zephyr' squashes that are still tender. Summer squashes that reach maturity will be drier with thicker skins. Choose firm, undamaged squashes with glossy skins free of cracks and blemishes. Select smaller to medium-sized specimens. Overly large squashes tend to be fibrous and bitter, and very small squashes can lack flavor.

Prepare. Before eating or cooking, wash and cut off both ends of the squash. Unless the skin is bitter, you do not have to peel tender squash.

The weather will direct your efforts in the kitchen garden in September. Frost may strike even the mildest of regions before the end of the month.

Know the average first frost date for your area. This date will allow you to plan your garden activities and prepare for cold weather in advance. The average first frost date can vary from year to year but when the first frost comes your warm-weather crops will be done for the year unless you take steps to protect them and extend their season. Check with a nearby garden center, master gardener program, or your county agriculture commissioner's office to learn the average first frost date in your region.

From the date of the first frost, autumn and winter gardening will go under cover; use cloches, plastic tunnels, and cold frames to extend your growing season. If you live in a frost-free or nearly frost-free region, second spring will arrive later this month. In regions where the weather chills but never drops to freezing cool-weather crops can go back into the garden and your second spring will begin.

If you do not plan to keep the kitchen garden growing with cool-season crops during autumn and winter, consider planting the beds with a green-manure cover crop. Green manures or cover crops add organic matter to the soil; they are tilled or turned under after a while. Cover crops roots keep the soil loose, moist and aerated when vegetables are not in the garden. They also protect the soil from winter rains and erosion and add nutrients to the soil--thus green manure.

Green manure cover crops include annual rye or ryegrass, buckwheat and winter rye. Other excellent cover crops come from the legume family: clovers, vetches, and alfalfa. The roots of legumes add residual nitrogen to the soil which will benefit vegetables and herbs growing in the garden next season.

September is the ninth month of the year these days, but under the old Roman calendar, September was the seventh month. The Latin word for "seven" is septem.

The autumnal equinox will arrive on September 22 this year in the northern half of the world, summer will end and autumn will begin.

September is one of the warmest months of the year particularly in the southern regions. In the northern regions, the days can be hot, but the nights will become increasingly cool.

The Greeks honored Demeter during this month, and the Romans honored Ceres, goddesses of agriculture.

Harvest festivals and feasts come in September to celebrate the end of harvest.

In the garden this month, plant cool season crops that will endure frost: beets, carrots, Swiss chard, head and leaf lettuce, mustard, onion seeds and sets, radish, turnips, and kale.

September brings in spring and ends winter in the Southern Hemisphere.

The first day of spring in the southern part of the world this year is September 22. On this day, the sun rises directly in the east and sets directly in the west. The time between sunrise and sunset is exactly 12 hours.

March can be both wintery and spring-like. Some days will be blustery and others will be mild and sunny.

Sap flows in the trees in March and green buds begin to appear. Early songbirds will arrive this month.

Vegetables: The work of the spring and summer vegetable garden can begin during March. Prepare vegetable garden beds. Winter mulches can be removed. Peas and spinach can be sown outdoors where they are to grow as soon as the ground can be worked. Onions sets can be planted this month also.

This is Part III of a four part series; see series list below.

Below is a list of cool-weather vegetable varieties for your garden.

Select plant varieties that are suited for cool weather or that come to harvest quickly when planting cool-season gardens. Cool-season plant varieties are best suited for planting the kitchen garden in early spring or in late summer, autumn, and winter.

Check the seed packet or the plant marker that comes with vegetable starts to see how many days the seed or plant requires to reach maturity.

Make sure that there is plenty of time for your plants to mature in advance of the first freeze if you are planting the autumn or winter garden. Conversely cool-season crops planted in spring do best if they mature before the weather turns warm.

You may find that transplants or vegetable starts work best in autumn. That way summer crops can remain in the garden for a few weeks longer. Of course, starts begun under cover in spring and later transplanted into the open extend the growing season as well.

Also in the coldest growing regions, a double cover of both a tunnel and cold frame may keep the soil from freezing.

Here is a guide to cool-season kitchen garden crop varieties:

Cool-season crops are best suited for planting in autumn, winter and spring. In spring, cool-season crops can be planted just before or just after the last frost. Planting cool-seaon crops in autumn and winter takes a bit more planning.

To plan and plant your autumn and winter garden follow these steps:

Step 1. Start with the number of days it takes the crop you are planting to grow to maturity and harvest. Days to maturity will be listed on the seed package. (If you are transplanting vegetable starts from the garden center, the days to maturity from transplanting are usually listed on the plant marker.)

Step 2. Determine the average first frost date in your region. If you are not sure, check with a nearby garden center, the master gardener program in your area, or the county or state agriculture extension office. Remember that this date is an average and thus a guideline for your calculations. The first frost date varies from year to year.

Step 3. Add 10 days to the number of days to maturity for the crop you are planting. Now count back on a calendar from the average first frost date the total number of days for each crop. That is the last recommended date to direct seed the crop. (Direct seed means sowing the seed in the soil of your garden.)

As a quick guide, here's how many days several cool-season crops need to reach maturity:

The time for sowing depends upon where you live. What to plant depends upon the season and weather.

Vegetables are generally divided into two categories: cool-season crops and warm-season crops.

Cool-season crops should be planted so that they mature when the weather is cool, either in spring or early summer or in autumn or winter. Cool-season crops come to harvest in cool weather, either in spring or fall or winter. Cool-season crops can be planted when the soil and air tempertures are cool, as low as 40ºF (5ºC). Mature cool-season crops can survive in temperatures near freezing without protection. Cool-season crops do not do well in the warmest summer temperatures.

Warm-season crops should be planted so that they mature when the weather is warm, when the soil and air temperatures are above 50ºF (10ºC). They will grow best when the temperature is 75ºF (24ºC) or warmer. Warm-season vegetables can be grown out of their season if they are protected from temperatures below 50ºF (10ºC).

The end of August and the beginning of September is a time of planning and planting in the ktichen garden. In the northern hemisphere, summer is giving way to autumn and winter will soon follow. In the southern henisphere, winter is giving way to spring.

Wherever you live--except in the tropics--this is a time for planting cool-weather plants. If your transition is from winter to spring and the garden is nearly empty (in Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile and South Africa) then now is the time to sow or soon sow cool-weather spring crops in the cold frame or directly into the garden. If you live in the northern hemisphere (North America, Europe, Russia, China and temperate Asia), where the garden is still full of summer crops, the transition from warm-weather crops to cool-weather autumn and winter crops is a feat of spacing and timing.

This begins a short series--a few days and articles--on growing cool-weather crops. Here's what we will cover:

Part I: Cool-Season and Warm-Season Crops: the basics.

Part II: Planting the Autumn, Winter, and Spring Garden.

Part III: Cool-Season Vegetable Varieties: what to plant in autumn and spring.

Part IV: Extending the Season: how to get more time out of your garden.

Kitchen gardening is both an art and a science. There are plenty of growing basics to follow, and if you do you will almost always be successful, that's the science part. But gardening is also an art, which is to say both you and the weather can do something unexpected (and, for the most part, you will still be mostly successful). Growing the kitchen garden is never the same from one garden to the next and from one day or week or year to the next. The best rule to follow is to simply enjoy doing the best you and your garden can with what you know and what Nature gives you. With time, your knowledge and experience will change (and grow) and so will Nature. The lesson: enjoy each moment.

Flavor is probably the best reason for selecting a tomato for kitchen garden growing. Once you have identified your favorite tomato (or tomatoes), the memory of that fruit's flavor will easily get you started in spring and keep you going until harvest year after year. Getting to know new tomatoes and their tastes will bring added pleasure to kitchen gardening. Visiting farm markets and tasting peak-season, just-picked tomatoes each summer is the best way to come up with your short list of tomatoes to grow next year.

To get you started on your taste and tomato growing odyssey, here's a mid summer tomato tasting checklist. You will find many of these tomatoes at farmers' markets and farm stores in mid summer. Of course, taste is not the sole criteria for selecting tomatoes. Use is often of equal importance, slicing, cooking,  and preserving for example. Perhaps you need a sauce or paste tomato that is great tasting; not every great tasting tomato will do.

Tomatoes that come to harvest in mid summer are known as mid-season or main-crop tomatoes. Mid-season tomatoes are ready for harvest about 70 to 80 days after being transplanted into the garden. (Most transplants get a 6 to 8 week head start in the greenhouse or under cover before going into the garden.) In the northern hemisphere, mid season tomatoes are at their peak harvest in August.

Mid season tomatoes are appropriate choices in regions where the growing season is relatively short to middling in length, where the night temperatures and even daytime temperatures are likely to turn cool to chilly in September. Late-season tomatoes, which come to harvest more than 80 days after transplanting, are good choices for long-growing season regions. (Early-season tomatoes are best for very short northern growing seasons or where summer's are cool such as near the ocean.)

In this starter's checklist, some of the work is done for you. Size is indicated: small salad-size tomatoes are usually in the 2 to 3 ounce category; midsize slicing, paste, sauce, and cooking tomatoes are usually 4 to 8 ounces; and large slicing and juicing tomatoes weigh in at 9 ounces and greater. (There are a few tomatoes that weigh in excess of a pound or more, and these you will take to the county fair.)

Just tender cooked borlotti beans--often called cranberry beans--are a tasty late summer snack.

Use your thumb to pop open the fresh-picked speckled pods, place a few handfuls of beans in a skillet and cover with just an inch of water; add a couple of cloves of garlic, pepper corns, and fresh sage, and simmer until they are just tender, about 10 to 15 minutes. Drain away the water; let the beans dry a minute or two in a colander or on paper towels; lightly salt to taste and drizzle with extra virgin olive oil. You can serve them alone warm or cooled or add them to the antipasto tray with mixed cheeses and sausages.

If the beans are fresh picked just barely visible in the pod and still young, you can leave out the cooking part, and snack on the creamy textured, nutty flavored borlottis simply adding olive oil and sea salt. If you've brought home dried beans, soak those 3 to 8 hours at room temperature or place them in a saucepan covered with water and bring to a boil, remove from the heat, and soak for 1½ hours before cooking.

The borlotti bean is an oval to round, ivory and dark red to brown speckled and blotched bean. It comes in a pod very similar, streaked ivory and dark red. The beans and pods are just about the same size as a large string bean. Inside, the borlotti is cream colored. Its flavor compares to the chestnut. Borlottis are shell beans; you don't eat the pods.

Costoluto Genovese is a large, juicy Italian heirloom tomato with an acidic-tart full-tomato flavor well suited for slicing and serving fresh or cooking.

Costoluto Genovese has been a Mediterranean favorite since at least the early eighteenth century. The key to this mid-season beefsteak's rich tomato flavor is heat. Grown away from the dry, sun-drenched gardens of the Mediterranean this tomato might disappoint.

Mid-season tomatoes such as Costoluto Genovese are ready for harvest mid summer. Late-season tomatoes demand 80 or more days to mature; mid-season tomatoes reach their peak at about 70 days and sometimes earlier.

Costoluto Genovese is heavily lobed, even scalloped. In profile this tomato appears flattened and fluted to the point of convoluted. Appearances needn't be off putting; Costoluto Genovese slices nicely at its scallops and is perfect for adding to fresh vegetable plates. Of course, like any other beefsteak this tomato is very meaty and can be sliced across to make a tasty tomato and basil sandwich.

In Italy Costoluto Genovese is a favorite for pasta sauces and pastes; for these, remove the this tomato's medium-thick skin. Of course, the skin makes Costoluto Genovese a good choice for broiling and grilling. And if this prolific, indeterminate producer delivers more than you can keep up with, juicing is an excellent alternative for Costoluto Genovese.

The cubanelle sweet pepper is tasty lightly roasted and served on a summer sandwich or green salad.

Core and seed three or four of the long tapered cubanelles and place them on the grill or about five inches below the oven broiler element and cook until the skins blister and char on each side, about 10 minutes per side. Next, place the peppers in a large sheet of aluminum foil and leave until they are no longer hot; now, you slice and remove the ribs and seeds and peel the skins away and arrange these colorful peppers to their best effect.

(Tasty tip: an hour before roasting, place the peppers in a glass bowl with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, 3 or 4 sprigs of thyme, and salt and pepper to taste. Turn the peppers every 15 minutes so they will be evenly coated with oil.)

Ok, if that sounds like too much work, the mild and colorful cubanelle can be sliced raw right onto a green salad and topped with vinaigrette. Or slice up some cubanelles to add to fresh salsa.

Cubanelles are mild to spicy, less so with cooking. You'll find the flavor of the cubanelle akin to the popular Anaheim sweet pepper. Cubanelles range in color from green to yellow to red. A red cubanelle is a ripe pepper but not necessarily more spicy than a green cubanelle. When it comes to hot, be assured the Cubanelle barely rate on the Scoville unit pepper heat meter.

Cubanelles are also known as Italian frying peppers. They are popular in Italy added to casseroles and pizzas.

Baby corn fresh picked is sweet and crunchy. You can eat it whole out of hand--yes, kernels and cob together, add it raw to salads, or cook it quickly in stir fries. Fresh baby corn among crudités is a summer-only delight.

But fresh-picked baby corn--not the baby corn out of a can swimming in a pan at the downtown salad bar--comes with a short window of opportunity; it must be had in mid-summer during just the one or two days after the silks of the corn cob emerge from the husk, called "silking". After that, baby corn is on its way to becoming an adult.

You, no doubt, know baby corn when you see it. It's the finger-length corn that most often shows up in Thai and Chinese dishes. It looks like miniature corn on the cob. But baby corn does not come from dollhouse-sized corn plants; baby corn is harvested from standard varieties of sweet and field corn just after silking

Picked fresh baby corn is sweet, juicy and crunchy. Wait until the third or fourth day after the silks emerge from the ears and baby corn begins to grow starchy and hard and you then must wait another 20 to 50 days for pollinated ear to mature to full size and regain their sweet natural corn flavor and tenderness.

While canned baby corn is dull flavored--after all, baby corn for canning is most often grown in Asia, where the required hand picking is less costly, and must travel a distance to reach you, fresh-picked baby corn even stir fried will have full sweet corn flavor, the same flavor you catch when you rush fresh-picked full-size corn to the table minutes after harvest.

Slice the pencil thin long bean into 1 to 2 inch bite-sized pieces and stir fry with a bit of ginger then serve as a side dish with pork or fish.

Add sliced long beans to soups or more simply add them blanched or raw to a salad just as you would the French haricots verts.

Long beans have a chewy, crunchy texture--more so than snap beans--and a flavor reminiscent of the dry navy bean or asparagus. Asparagus! Yes, that is where this cousin of the black-eyed pea gets one of it many other common names: the asparagus bean.

Asparagus bean, yard long bean (it actually can grow to nearly a yard long, though it will be tastier at half that length), Chinese pea and China pea (where this bean is a favorite), snake bean (looks like), dau gok, and in the Caribbean bodi or boonchi are other common names for this legume.

Besides stir-fry, soups and salads, the long bean is a good choice for stewing, braising (to remain chewy and firm), sautéing, shallow frying, and deep frying. With cooking, the long bean's bean flavor intensifies.

Too many apples? Sometimes, yes.

The best way to large delicious apples is thinning the crop.

Thinning apples is easy. Thin the fruit to a distance of twice the diameter of the fruit at maturity. If you expect the mature apples to be 3-inches across, leave 6 inches between each apple after thinning. If you're not sure how big the apples on your tree will be at their peak, thin to a distance of 6 to 8 inches apart on the branch.

Some apple thinners remove the fruit on every other spur; others leave a fruit on every third spur as they thin from the trunk outward on a branch. Always leave the largest fruit on the spur. Whichever method you choose, the goal is to leave plenty of room for each apple to mature.