Having extra space in a garden bed with summer nearly over has made me a little sad. I'm not looking forward to empty garden boxes this winter, so I've been sort of desperately looking for "last minute" things to plant. Every time I've gone through my seed collection searching for fast growers that will tolerate cooler weather, all I find that will work is lettuces.
So in one last ditch effort to find anything else, lettuce still won out as the thing to plant this weekend. If it's coming from the National Gardening Association, it can't be wrong, right?
"Lettuce is the perfect crop for this backward gardening exercise because
it grows well even when soil temperatures are in the 40 degrees F to
50 degrees F range. Lettuce also grows well with fewer daily sunlight
hours than almost any other crop, and mature plants can withstand air
temperatures as low as 25 degrees F."
The full page is here: http://www.garden.org/articles/articles.php?q=show&id=53