mehearty, I donÂt know what state you live in but I am guessing that in zone 4/5 your soil temperatures are still pretty cold. I had been told by a trusted landscaper that you really want to wait till the soil warms when applying organic fertilizers otherwise your wasting your time and money. University of Florida Extention Breakdown of organic fertilizer in soil With suitable conditions, organic matter is broken down by organisms living in the soil, such as fungi, bacteria, algae, molds, insects and earthworms. In the process, nitrogen and other nutrients are converted to forms a plant can use. Nitrification is the term used for the conversion of organic nitrogen to available forms. Since nitrogen is the nutrient most often limiting plant growth, you must make sure that the following conditions exist in your soil (or compost pile) for good nitrification to occur:  Nitrogen-rich materials  Proper acidity (pH): 5.8 to 7.0  Proper temperature--over 50°F  Good aeration  Adequate soil moisture.

Our rain was pretty scarce here until recently. All those earlier rain storms missed us. Most of them went south of us, just like the snow this winter went south. Then when there were nice showers around us I'd wait for the rain which never came, so I'd check the radar and there was a nice big hole right on top of us as everybody else was getting good rain. Our grass was burned and brown and is just now turning green, but there's still some nice brown in there. I'd say we've had a dry spring with lots of sunshine. Perhaps it's payback because you STOLE ALL OF OUR SNOW!!! I still don't see why you couldn't have shared a little of it. Maybe next winter you'll let us keep our snow and we'll let you have some sunshine? Deal?

Jfernandez,I have 2 Carrie one in a pot and the other one on the ground for more than 2 years now. mangodog,I live in Carson,90745 by long beach. marinfla,Atemoya has been in the ground fora couple of years now and they are fast growing.Hopefully I get fruit this year as last year I did not let fruit set. Simon grow,Favorite so far is Carrie but this year is the first year I will let my lancetilla and mallika hold fruit.

Amy, Unfortunately it is about to start feeling like July. The good thing about the rain is it has kept us cooler. There's no rain in my 7-day forecast, so I expect we'll dry out a lot over the next week, and we're expected to hit the upper 90s early next week. Can 100 degrees be far behind? Bon, Yay for the rain. You did need it and I'm glad you got it. You may feel stormed out, but it will be a fleeting feeling. We are about to feel the wrath of July heat + high humidity from all the moisture in the ground, so I think it is going to feel worse for a while before it feels better. Carol, Well, Grove was overdue for some heavy rainfall and apparently it finally happened. With all the accidents on the lake over the July 4th weekend, I hope people will be exceptionally carefully out there on the water now that there's all the runoff from all that rainfall. I have about half of my garden weeded and more or less under control---the upper half that dries out more quickly. I got a lot of that weeding done in the two hours I was out there this morning. I quickly harvested the one row of tomato plants that I hadn't harvested from prior to the storm, and then I weeded, weeded, weeded as the sun climbed higher in the sky and the temperatures began heating up. The fence lines are a mess, though, and I have to go slowly and carefully with them because that's one of the favorite hiding places of the timber rattlers. I do the same thing with rain gauges. I've noticed that even the radar-indicated rainfall this year has rarely matched what I've recorded in my rain gauge, and neither does our mesonet station's. It's why I try to keep an unbroken rain gauge (and occasionally a slightly-cracked one that manages to record most of the rainfall) out in the yard at all times. I left the one that cracked in the winter and put a new one beside it. There is only about a 0.10" difference between the two, so the broken one is almost recording correctly. Dorothy, For so long this year, I was worried y'all weren't getting enough rain, but I can see now that you're getting plenty. Last year was perfect for us in terms of rainfal, beginning in mid-June, and once the rain started, it's hardly stopped at all. Prior to mid-June, the drought was so bad I was about to close the garden gate and walk away, so the rain began falling in the nick of time. It can stop now if it wants. After the drought years of 2011-2013, I am just thrilled to have plenty of rainfall and (so far) not too many grasshoppers. It has been a struggle all year to keep up with the bare minimum of mowing, trimming and hand-weeding, but we just keep plugging along, doing what we can when we can and not worrying or fretting about what we can't get done. You can only do whatever the conditions, weather and time available allow, so I try not to worry about the rest. Eventually we'll get it all done. Sandplum, I weeded all I could this morning and was happy with what I got done, but some of those weeds were so big already that I had to dig them out rather than pulling them out. I'll get out there in the cool early morning hours tomorrow and try to work on it for another 2-4 hours. In June and July the harvesting and canning keeps me too busy to focus too much on weeding, and the rain this year has made weeding even harder to accomplish, but the tomato canning is winding down now, so I should get to weed every day for the next week, especially with no rain in the forecast. I think that with a week of weeding every morning, I should catch up on the backlog of weeds waiting to be removed. Y'all, I don't remember exactly what our all-time record rainfall is, but I believe it is around 59". I need to look it up and see. I am fairly certain we'll break that record this year, as Burneyville is sitting at 54" right now. Never, ever, even after 2007, did I think we'd see that sort of rainfall here. Dawn