This is our eighth year here, so I'm enjoying some nicely established plants as well. The junipers are already bigger than I expected them to be, the daylilies and lilies are well worth having, and I've even managed to keep my clematis alive for a change. Three times a charm I guess. My roses amaze me, as I was unsure I'd be able to grow them, but it turns out they're not that hard. Gardening life is good, as long as we don't get any hail.

Betty, Did you take the broken rose branch and root it? Might as well make lemonade when life gives you lemons. The wind here is ridiculous today. It is a wonder the row covers haven't blown away but I do have them pinned down pretty firmly. I have tried to keep the peppers warm by having them in the greenhouse during the day, and bringing them inside the house if I think the greenhouse will drop below 40 degrees or so. My poor pepper plants barely know what real sunlight is because they haven't seen it in so long. I want to plant all the rest of my hot-season stuff, but have been waiting for some consistency in the forecast too. Since I couldn't direct-sow anything today (I would have had to remove the row covers), I started a lot of warm-season herbs and flowers in flats, and a few veggies like cukes, melons, watermelons, Armenian cukes, etc. I hope to pop them out of the six-packs and into the ground the minute the first tiny bit of green pops up out of the soil-less mix. I intend to put bean seeds in the ground tomorrow. They raised tomorrow night's forecast low from 44 to 48, so I feel like it will be warm enough. Our 3-day average soil temp dropped from the low 70s to the mid or upper 60s with with this last cold front, but the soil in the raised beds is still pretty warm. Likely the row covers have helped them stay warmer by holding in the heat. Carol, I am concerned about the weather too. I am hoping that the cold spells haven't lasted long enough to cause bolting. If they do, they do....there's nothing we can do about it. The reason I have covered my onion bed's hoops with the 10-degree row cover for every cold spell is not because I thought the onions might freeze but because I hoped it would keep them warm enough that they'd be less likely to bolt. I guess we'll know in the next couple of weeks if they are going to bolt, and I am hoping they won't because they are so lovely right now and will make a great crop if they don't bolt and if hail doesn't get them. Our Sugar Snaps are producing faster than we can pick them and eat them. I guess it makes up for the early heat wrecking the crop the last two years. Either we need to start eating them at every meal, or I need to freeze some. I planted mine in paper cups in February and then got them into the ground as early as I could, but I planted a certain percentage of them every week for 3 or 4 weeks, trying to spread out the risk of a late freezing getting them. I also staggered the potato plantings quite a lot. The first two beds that I planted are the tallest, and the third bed is not far behind. They are getting too tall to cover so we're in trouble if we get another cold front, which I hope doesn't happen of course. I was looking at the first two beds a few minutes before sunset, and the plants look like they've grown 6-8 inches since Tim covered up those beds on Wed.evening. You can see the plants pushing and straining at the row cover. I think it keeps them so warm that they grow faster while it is on them. I haven't planted a single bean yet, but hope to rectify that tomorrow. We have a lot of rain chances in our forecast for next week, and since lately our rain has come only in little bits....a few hundredths of an inch here, a tenth of an inch there, we really need that rain. Maybe if I get the beans in the ground and then it rains, they'll sprout quickly to make up for going into the ground so late. You still might get more parsley volunteers. Just this past week, volunteers started popping up like mad. I imagine when we rototilled all the soil repeatedly while rebuilding the beds this spring, we exposed a lot of buried seeds to sunlight. While weeding on Wed. right before putting on the row covers, I saw volunteer seedlings of all kinds---okra, watermelon, ornamental purple-leaved peppers, flowers of several kinds, tomatoes, etc. I even saw basil and corn volunteers. The basil can stay but I'll yank out the corn since it is in the middle of a row of garlic. I know you don't like cilantro and won't try to change your mind about it, but I grow it near potatoes and I do believe it helps keep the potato bugs away. I planted about 30 lbs. of seed potatoes so we have row after row of potato plants and I haven't seen a single CPB yet. Grasshoppers, however, have arrived in full force. Dawn

My garden is really quite small. It's only about 1/4 acre. It's amazing how much plant material one can cram into a small plot! My grass, both front and back, is sort of like two area rugs! Less to mow - DGS's can mow in less than 15 minutes. It's taken 33 years to get to this point, with many setbacks due to trees blowing down/dying. Always a work in progress... wish I could still work in the garden - for the last 2-3 years, I sit and point! I have a yardman (whom I've trained - totally untrained when hired) for 4 hrs a week. This time of year, I could use him everyday but he has other yards and also works full time in housekeeping at a local hospital - has worked there for 32 years. Nicest man on earth!

I've been experimenting with cucumbers, but I buy them at the farmers' market. I tried fermenting some, and I think I used the wrong kind of cucumber; also they came out rather bland, and so I think I need to add some more spices/herbs to them. I added dill flower stalks, but dill does not grow well for me in the summer - it's mostly a winter herb for me, like parsley and cilantro. I also think the cucumbers needed more salt. I'm trying to grow a new crop of chocolate Habanero chilies but have not been having much luck with seeds this year. I planted over a dozen, and the first six did not make it, and now of the slower second six, only one or two seem to be making healthy plants. I used seeds that I bought, and next time I will also try using seeds that I have collected from my last crop. Basil is not looking great either - it seems to do better when I plant it later in the summer, and then it produced on into the winter - sometimes through January. I made a zucchini casserole last week, but I got the zucchini at the farmers' market also.