There are many hardy roses which may not have the big high centered flowers of the hybrid teas but are pretty in their own right and fragrant as a bonus. Any hybrid rugosa is good and is hardy to the tips, very fragrant also. Canadian Explorers of which there are several climbers were specially hybridized to withstand temperatures to minus 40 in some cases. The Canadian Parkland series, many of which begin with Morden, as in Morden Sunrise, Morden Ruby, and Morden Fireglow, bloom very much like floribundas and Griffith Buck roses are often referred to as hybrid tea wannabees. While the latter will die back somewhat, they come back quickly. I also grow over 20 climbers that are hardy also. Roses by Bailey nurseries from your area are also hardy. Hardy can mean crown hardy not necessarily cane hardy. In your zone, burying the bud union 4-6 inches deep will help protect the bush except on really tender hybrid teas. I'd get own root roses as they have no bud union to worry about. You'll not find own roots at Pickering and Palatine. Roses Unlimited, Vintage Roses, among others are fine own root nurseries but you should purchase now or wait until spring. If planted too late in the season, own root roses grown in warm climates and shipped to cold growing area, won't have time to get established and acclimated this year. While I don't get as cold as you, I grow 400 hardy varieties in my zone 5a and do little more than allow nature to blow leaves in around the bases of my roses. Snow cover before a severe drop in temps will also act as insulation. You should have snow cover most of the winter. E-mail me for a list of roses I grow that are hardy for me and would most likely survive your cold winters. All mine are own root.

Memo, As you know, I have sandy soil too. I have a few suggestions, even though I know you are as likely as me to already know and do these things: 1. If you can, buy a big bag of Miracle Grow "potting soil" and lightly dig it in around your strawberry plants. One or two big bag should be enough to do all of your beds around the base of your house. You just want to add a little to amend your sandy soil, not replace it. That will help your sandy soil retain moisture better and give your plants a little boost to get their roots started. I have added bags of peat in the past two years and have seen much improvement in growing more kinds of plants in my sandy soil because it adds acidity and help hold moisture. It lowers the pH of your soil so it is not so alkaline. 2. Give your strawberry plants a shot of Miracle Grow plant food mixed with water. Use the tiny scoop size that comes in the package mixed with a gallon of water. This inoculation will perk them right up within a few hours or overnight. I often use it when I set out soft tissue plants, like annuals, as it prevents or at least reduces transplant wilt caused by shock to their root system - their roots no longer can draw up water and nutrients and produce the sugars they need, so they go into shock...or...transplant wilt. The inoculation is like giving a fix to a junky. :) Once a week will continue to help them and hold them over until they can sink their roots into the soil and do it themselves. 3. If you drink coffee or tea, start throwing your grounds (and other kitchen waste) in your veggie garden plot. It is amazing what that does to your veggie garden soil and will not burn your plants. You can dig it right into your spaces between plants, too. Just make sure you cut everything up into small pieces so it rots fast and doesn't attract stink and/or attract critters. 4. For your Veggie Garden and Strawberry plants: Make a bucket of manure tea to water/feed them. They will reward you greatly for it. Put cow, sheep, horse or rabbit manure into a gallon bucket, add water. Let sit for at least a week in a cool, shady place. Then, dilute it with water, two parts water to one part manure tea, and water your plants with it. You will NOT get Ecoli from the manure tea. 5. Put hay or pine straw around your strawberry plants. They do better if their leaves don't get wet. They tend to get moldy and diseases and then die. Don't overwater. Allow the soil to dry out between waterings. Once berries begin to ripen, stop watering, unless there you are having drought like conditions. The fruit will be sweeter and they will not rot. 6. Sawdust that has not been composted down will zap the nitrogen right out of your soil - BEWARE. Stick to hay and grass clippings or pine straw. Doing these things and using your grass clippings and hay mulch will really get things off to a good start. Even if you know to do these things, others might not. ~Annie

At our house, the harvest is hot and heavy right now. We have potatoes and onions curing everywhere, on every flat surface available. Today I'm going to start slicing and chopping onions to freeze for later use in cooking, and then the rest of the first batch of cured onions will go into tubular net bags for storage. The second onion batch needs to cure for at least another week and then they'll get the same treatment. I'm going to send 10 or 20 lbs. of onions and the same amount of potatoes to work with DS on the next day he works, which I think is Thursday, because I've promised his fire station chef a steady supply of fresh veggies. I am picking tomatoes about every other day, and we have more than we can handle at this point, which is a great problem to have. I don't think it will continue to be such a great tomato year for too many more weeks though, because our temperatures are well above the range at which flowers set fruit.) We need a cold spell here. By cold, I mean any weather with highs only in the low 90s and lows in the low 7os. We have enough tomato fruitset that I think we'll be harvesting all we can handle through mid-July but am not sure what we'll get after that. Yesterday we were down in the metroplex shopping for a few hours and we dropped off two Wal-Mart bags of tomatoes for DS's crew at the station which generated a lot of excitement among them, and saved me from having to do any canning yesterday. (I didn't have time.) On Sunday afternoon I put up 8 quart bags of green beans in the freezer, and I'm going outside in just a few minutes to pick beans again. I was hoping it would be nice and cool this morning, but our low temp for the night was 80, so we're starting out kind of warm already and the sun isn't even up yet. Yesterday morning we harvested the early sweet corn, which was the variety 'Early Sunglow'. We got about 75 good ears and a few bad ones that either had been 'sampled' by the raccoons, had poor fertilization because of the heat or something else that resulted in unusable ears. I gave the bad ears (less than a dozen total) to the chickens who were delighted with them, and put the rest in the refrigerator. We ate some fresh last night and will have more today, and I am going to blanch and freeze the rest this afternoon. Some years the raccoons get all the corn, and there's rarely a year in which we beat them to all of it, so I'm very happy with our harvest. I hope we're able to get as many ears from the mid-season corn and the late-season corn, but we'll be fighting both the coons and the corn earworms and European corn borers, so who knows what we'll get from them. Our garden is in the transition stage, where the last of the cool-season crops have just come out (I finally yanked the broccoli and cabbage because they just weren't doing anything at all) and have been replaced with hot-season crops so we'll have something to harvest in July and August. With highs in the upper 90s and lower 100s already and lows in the mid-70s throug low-80s, our weather here feels more like late July and August than June, so I am concerned about the effect of the heat on the garden---but there's nothing we can do about the heat except go with the flow. The bigger issue is the lack of rainfall. There's been no rain here for about 3 weeks our last rainfall was a half-inch on May 24t), and no good chance of rain anytime for us anytime in the foreseeable future. With 100-degree heat and no rainfall, everything here is rapidly drying out and turning brown, and we are starting to see grassfires. I'm already wrestling with the decision about whether to water or how much to water. We did run the soaker hoses to water the soil/foundation area yesterday, and I'm going to run a soaker hose in the garden today to water a couple of beds, but I am not doing a lot of watering. The problem with trying to keep a veggie garden green in this kind of heat is that the garden becomes an oasis that attracts tons of bugs when everything else is browning out, and we have a lot of wildlife (deer, raccoons, possums, skunks, rabbits, etc.) trying to get into the garden every day and every night. It is going to be a long summer. We have a surging spider mite and grasshopper population too, but also have lots of ladybugs so I'm not overly worried about the mites. The hoppers may be a problem, but only time will tell. Dawn

I cant see the tomato plant very well but tomatoes, especially young ones are WAY sensitive to chemical anything. Just the drift of herbicide or in your case, perhaps pesticide can damage them. I have had my seedlings damaged when someone, some neighbor sprayed. If its a light dose, they will usually outgrow it. If heavy they will put out gnarly and/or spindly growth for a long time.