It is time for the fall Houston vegetable garden. Tender, long-season plants such as corn and tomatoes should already be well along. Even when I lived in Houston full time, I generally did not bother with these and concentrated on the cooler weather crops and left these to the spring garden. Ideally, green beans should be planted in early September, or even late August if you don’t mind watering twice a day. I have had reasonable luck planting them as late as early October.
For the more traditional fall and winter crops such as turnips, various types of greens, cole family, lettuce, etc, I generally wait until October to plant. Turnips can certainly be started earlier because they come up so fast. But, generally I prefer not to battle the heat because there is really no reason to do so. All of these crops can stand a mild freeze. It has been a number of years since we have had an early freeze, or for that matter any hard freeze.
I considered planted some seed here in Montana and bring the plants down to get a jump start, but three days in the car is hard on plants even if you try to put them where they can get some light. With a dog traveling with us this year, it did not seem a very worthwhile effort to try and bring seedlings.
I saved lettuce, arugala and purple mustard seed this spring. I tested them here and all came up well and true to the variety.