i'm still germinating indoors with my yellow, cherry and heirloom tomatos, 2nd set of leaves finally came out, i'll plant when the third set come up. i've also got some bell peppers along with them, but - same story, not quite ready.

in my three beds outside, i have had the following planted for a couple of weeks:

arugula, bibb lettuce, spinach
purple basil, sweet basil, thyme, cilantro, parsley, anise, mint
green beans, carrots, cukes

it looks like my basil might not make it...the purple is almost gone after last week, and the green is down to its last stalk. i am hoping the green beans and cukes make it, but the edges of the leaves looked white as of Wednesday.

while i don't really consider it a veggie, it is edible, but ... on our back deck, we have about 50 purple shiso (perilla) plants coming up in a pot from last year - shiso came up wild in the yard, i transplanted it for looks, cut back all the seed pods before they dried and somehow still ended up with five million babies in the pot. glad i pulled it out of the yard. anyone locally (near grant park) want or need some shiso? :)

we're playing with fruit this year too, and put a 3rd year fig on one side yard, have a pair of 2nd year nanking cherries, and started some first-year grapes from cuttings. looking forward to getting the front yard planted out with cranberry bushes, blueberries, montmorency cherries, plums and maybe a peach and honeyberry.

Never heard of shiso. I had to look it up and I am still lost. It looks like lettuce??

ALL my blueberry bushes died. I guess the drought last year but then I think maybe my soil isn't to their liking. How does your montmorency cherry look? I was thinking of getting one. I am located near Columbus, Ga so not sure it would like my area.

shiso is much more upright and bushy than a lettuce, it's really similar in form to ... say ... Eupatorium ('rugosa', in particular). ours got nearly 40" tall at full height. i honestly had no clue what it was - i had to post THIS THREAD in the 'name that plant' forum to figure out what it was because, amazingly, the people at Urban Gardener and the local chain stores couldn't tell me what i had. the smell when you crush the leaf is like ... orange and cinnamon, but the flavor is sweet, almost has a curry taste to it, it can be very powerful taste, as powerful as anise, fennel or basil. for this reason, we typically use it only as an additive to the salad and greens we grow in the garden.

we haven't gotten the blueberries, cranberries and montmorency yet. we're waiting to complete a wall which will hold back the soil where the trees and shrubs will go (gardenweb member 'vroomp' is probably installing the wall, FWIW. we are really excited about it!)

our soil is generally pretty good. we went through all of our beds and amended the existing clay/dirt with a 6"-8" layer of better soil and tilled it all in. it took a couple of years, but there are worms all over like crazy.

btw - if you do go with a cherry, the montmorency is your typical "pie cherry" - it is a sour cherry, but they're really good. they are self-pollinating, while many other cherries are not. sweet cherries can supposedly grow in GA, but due to lack of cold-hours during winter time, sweet cherries reportedly don't produce a lot of fruit here.

the nanking cherries we have are just 2nd year shrubs (or trees?), they flowered like crazy a couple of weeks ago, but i don't know that the bees had a chance to do anything with them before the flowers got knocked off by rain and wind. as of yet, they haven't produced any fruit since we've had them.