Jim, Right now I am watching a literal river going down my long dirt driveway and feeling despair over all the lost rose blooms and broken canes. There is a thunderstorm overhead which continues on with a 1 1/2 hr. torrential downpour. Earlier today was no doubt peak rose day for the old once-bloomers and I've been calling everybody all week to beg them to come up and see the roses. I have been waiting a year for this day, peak rose day for the old roses. With all the rain, today was the one decent day and the buds opened up and were breathtaking. Only a couple of people showed up so I was out snapping hundreds of photos since it has rained everyday all June and they were predicting thunderstorms. Now the blooms are all floating down the 'rivers' that run between the rosebushes and most of the bushes have just toppled completely over from the heavy, waterlogged blooms. My brother just called me to say that they were coming over to see the roses (finally) and I said "are you crazy? You're going to need an ark to get here!" He says its sunny at his house and they've been in the pool. We both have homes on mountains and he can see my mountain from his upper deck, just 6 miles away. He says "Celeste, I can see a black cloud sitting right over your mountain and can hear thunder and the weather radar shows a bad thunderstorm situated right over your mountain but nowhere else. It is sunny all around you!" Great. Even God likes my brother more. My roses are destroyed and my basement is flooded. Our bedroom is downstairs in the basement. It was already getting mildew down there from the constantly-wet ground, but now our carpet is soggy, our clothes are moldy, and the walls are damaged. Outside, the ground is so saturated from a month of rain, there is nowhere for the 3 inches that just fell to go and my lawn and gardens are under water. The modern roses will recover and bloom again, but the Old Rose season which had just barely began, is over. There are fallen petals floating everywhere. I am usually an optimistic person, but this is just ridiculous. Sigh. Celeste

Dry here in western MD -- not affecting established trees w/deep roots yet, but certainly beginning to affect planted row crops & gardens. I even had alittle frost damage the other morning (thermometer said 34F at eye-level) on the sprout-tips of sensitive, low-hanging stuff like sourwood. Shaping up as perhaps similar to last summer -- cool w/a bit less than avg rain & zero tropical moisture.

Thank you, Val, excellent info about the dose (2 Tablespoon) .. is your soil sandy/loamy ? Sandy soil leaches out salt easier than clay (retains salt very well). Seaweed from CA (alkaline clay) raises her own-chicken, she dilutes her fresh-poo with water 1st, before applying. Seaweed has 11 inch. of rain, compared to Newberry, Florida of 47.33 of rain. Sulfate of potash has salt-index of 43, at half of salt-index of high-nitrogen chicken manure. I put 1 teaspoon sulfate of potash per small own-root rose. The roses in loamy potting soil (MG-moisture control) .. didn't mind. But the roses in my dense & heavy & sticky clay wilted in hot sun, despite my watering in. For that reason I don't apply fertilizer in clay, unless it's all-night, or all-day rain right after application. When the deer ate all the leaves off my own-root Firefighter rose in June 2013, I spread 1/3 cup of dried-chicken manure NPK 5-3-2 around the bush .. and watered that in .. but we didn't get rain for over 2 weeks in June, and that burnt some of its roots, it didn't survive winter. The late rosarian Karl Bapst, zone 5a, also warned folks about less granular fertilizer in spring since the newly-grown feeder roots is so tiny, thus too much granular fertilizer will burn it. Zone 5a own-roots are so small, with winter below -20 killed all the feeder-roots, and new-growth is very tiny.

Rebecca, I do not believe it is your yard. I think it is this year. The early heat let a lot of pests, and in particular cucumber beetles, get off to an early start---both cucumber beetles and squash bugs, which have been around in huge populations this year, spread tons and tons of diseases. The only thing I can add is that sometimes container plants are a magnet for pests and it can become a vicious cycle. Here's how it most often happens here with container plantings: Container plants need more frequent feeding, as we often discuss here, because of the way irrigation and rainfall wash away the nutrients. More frequent feeding tends to give plants a burst of nitrogen here and there following a feeding. Excess nitrogen (and I am not saying you are feeding them excess nitrogen on purpose---it is hard to balance it just right in containers) causes plants to make more carbs. More carbs attract more pest insects. Pest insects carry diseases. Diseased plants look bad. You cut off diseased leaves and feed the plant to push new growth and recovery. Right? Right. I'd do exactly the same thing. Plants recover, make new growth, and pests hit again. There's your vicious cycle. It is worse in very dry and very wet years than in a more normal year. So, don't blame yourself. Blame the crazy insane weather that gave us drought, early heat, extreme cold, early pest outbreaks, snakes out in winter, rain, and floods....and that was just in January-March. It isn't like the weather has changed much. It has been nuts all year. It started crazy. It has stayed crazy. Jacob, The Oklahoma Climatological Survey says Nov. 7th for us, but based on the 19 years we've been here, I'd say our average first freeze tends to be around November 20th. We have been having a long-term trend since at least 2003 of warmer and warmer weather, so our old 30 year averages probably will change a bit when they redo the new averages at the end of this decade. Our average last freeze of Spring is, officially, March 29th, I think, but some years it has happened as early as the end of February. However, for 7 or 8 years, we kept having a late freeze every year around May 3rd. It was maddening. Rather than push planting later and later, I bought DeWitt Ultimate Frost Blanket Row Cover that gives 10 degrees of cold protection. Now, I plant when I want, usually around March 10-17 for tomatoes, and cover up the plants if cold weather threatens. This issue never has been our soil temperatures---our soil down here doesn't get that cold and it warms up quickly this far south, but our air temperatures are all over the place every year. So, nowadays, and I've done this for about 8 or 10 years now, I plant whenever I feel like the soil temperatures are stable and when the 10-day forecast looks pretty good, and then I can cover up the plants with frost blanket type row covers if cold threatens. Some years I end up covering up the plants about once a week for a couple of months. Other years I only cover up the plants once or twice in that first couple of months. It is incredible how well they grow if I can just protect them from that occasional late cold night. We have to push hard down here to beat the heat, and row covers as needed do that for me. That makes my main tomato harvest run from late May through late July usually, but our earliest tomatoes from in-ground plants usually are ripe in April from an early March planting (from plants that had blooms on them when planted), and this year we had our first ripe tomato in March, from a plant grown indoors in a large pot in a sunny south-facing window. I bought the plant at a Wal-Mart around the second week of January and its sole job was to give us tomatoes as early in the year as possible. Think about---we were harvesting and eating those tomatoes when most folks in our neighborhood didn't have plants purchased yet, and at about the same time I was putting our home-grown plants in the ground. It was awesome. Did it taste like a summer tomato? Nope. Tomatoes grown indoors in winter don't get enough heat or strong enough sunlight to develop full, rich in-season tomato flavor, but it still was much better than a grocery store tomato. In case no one else has mentioned this, I'll say it: I am a tomato maniac. Mary, It is the weather. There's not much we can do about it. I hate all the diseases this year. It is what it is. Surely next year will be better. (And, if you can steam clean things inside your house, why oh why isn't this steamy hot weather killing these plants diseases instead of making them worse?????) Rebecca, No, but it would be better than nothing. I've had butternuts run 20-30' when they are happy....sometimes I let them climb the 8' fence, cascade down the other side and then take off into the trees. Maybe in the future, you might want to grow some of the ones bred for containers. I've grown several and they still get fairly big but they are much more controlled/less rampant than regular butternuts. Nancy, I hear you on the big city stuff you don't need. I grew up in Fort Worth when it was considerably smaller than it was now...and so was Dallas....and the whole metroplex. Eventually it got to where it was getting too big and we moved here and found the rural living we desired. Then, Fort Worth-Dallas began undergoing phenomenal growth that is mind-blowing (the DFW metro area now has a population of 7.1 million compared to the roughly 5 million it had when we moved here in 1999). Other than having family there, and occasionally shopping there, I can't handle it any more. Everything is all concrete and endless development and growth and huge highways. There is nowhere down there I want to visit badly enough to get on a 14 lane highway.....who needs 7 lanes each way, even if only briefly, before they drop down to 6 lanes each way? I just need to stay home and wait for them to build a CostCo in Denton or Gainesville. Tim says he does get home more quickly now that the DFW Connector Project (multi-highway, including the 14-lane thing we were on yesterday) is done, but I wonder how long that big highway project lasts before continuing growth makes it obsolete and they build some 18- or 20-lane highway? Hopefully Tim will be retired by then and won't have to deal with that mess. The computer stuff is frustrating. I think they all can give you trouble from time to time, and getting someone to troubleshoot them and fix them is just as aggravating as can be. Good luck finding a nice back-up that is reliable and dependable. Amy, Augustus used to poop on the steps and patio, but I scold him and wash it right off when he does and he is (despite the general perception that turkeys are dumb) smart enough to know he shouldn't do it there. Now he seems to go out of his way to poop in the driveway, where you see big giant blobs of it there. I don't know why the driveway and not the yard, but I also don't care why. I'm glad Honey had a play date. Seems like it left her feeling more content to chill a bit more than usual afterwards. Hmmm. Maybe Honey needs her own puppy to play with. (Go ahead and pelt me with produce for saying that, but please, no rotten tomatoes.) I saw the first Harlequin bug of the year last week, about 5 months later than usual. I killed it and I just hope there aren't any more. I'm sure there are, but I haven't seen them. It has been too hot to do anything. I have seedlings to plant but I don't want to go out into the heat and plant them. I'm waiting until Wednesday, when our high is supposed to be in the 80s instead of the upper 90s. Enough of the side/back yard and dog yard are mowed that we can walk through those areas with no fear of not being able to see a snake. Mowing the front yard is on the agenda, probably for right after dinner this evening, when the sun is far enough west that temperatures are falling but when there also is still daylight. That's dependent on fire calls---we've only had 1 today and I hope our good luck holds. Dawn