Shade works well for leafy plants in the hot weather, but generally not for fruiting or root veggies. Lettuce goes into full shade in May, and even so I have to stop harvesting by July because it gets bitter, and then it's replaced by more heat tolerant greens - Swiss chard grows 12 months a year for me, and Malabar spinach is a tropical that can take a lot of heat. With light frost protection, I can grow lettuce and spinach over winter, as well as many herbs, while most alliums and brassicas don't even need covering. Plants that really love the sticky southern summer include a lot of traditional southern cuisine favorites - sweet potatoes (I grow them in large bins to save the effort of digging them up), peppers, okra, zucchini, and melons. Tomatoes do OK here - I don't get the intense heat that keeps people from growing them in the far south in summer (not sure about your area, but places like Texas can't do midsummer tomatoes), but they tend to be disease-prone in my garden.
This is getting pretty far from the topic of propagation, so we should probably continue the conversation elsewhere. I run a Cubit site on urban farming if you want to chat there (it's been quiet lately, but I'll respond to new posts), or else we could start a topic in the Edibles and Preserving forum. I could talk veggies all day, but don't want to step on the toes of the folks here to read about propagation.
