I have planted lettuce for three or four years now.Lettuce does need light to germinate, so do not burry the seeds. I have to keep reminding myself of that. I will sprinkle a little dirt/compost over the seeds. I am always a afraid birds with clean them out. I planted red sails and black jack. Both green and red. I liked the black jack better. Not from a taste stand point. But during and post harvest the black jack seemed to hold up better. The red sail seemed to wilt very quickly.

The lily leaf beetles ate my tiger lilies to the ground a couple of years ago - I've got 4 little stunted ones left that I'm trying to save. In my vigilance I've found lily leaf larvae on potatoes, chinese lantern (physalis) and violets. I'm trying to eradicate the chinese lantern and violet and I'm half tempted to let the beetles do it for me but they'll just move on to something else. Saturday I had 2 generations of larvae working on the chinese lanterns - all lined up in a row munching away, disgusting but also made it easy to pull up the whole plant and dump it in a bucket of soapy water. If I'm feeling particularly vengeful I dump some alcohol in with the soap. Any success stories? Happy Gardening!

It kind of depends how much ground you want to cover and what you want that to look like. Kashmir is a nice rose and totally trouble free in our zone, but it's not what I think of as a groundcover. It's a 3-4' nicely rounded bush, and the flowers are more of a crimson than a true red in my climate. I love it - it's trying to pump out blooms even in its first year in the bed - it's just more of a low to medium specimen rose than a ground cover. The red groundcover I do grow currently is Red Ribbons, and it's a Kordes. It has the more typical ground cover growth - about 18" high and 5' wide on a good year. It doesn't exactly fill in the space completely, as in weed control, but it's totally carefree and hardy as a rock. It has relatively loose blooms and they're a little on the crimson side of red, but it's a pretty steady bloomer all summer. If I were to plant a red ground cover again, I'd probably go back to Red Cascade. That one is also 18" high and as much as 10' wide. It puts out these amazing octopus arms that weave around everything else in the bed, and the blooms are these quarter-sized lovely dark red double blooms. You could clip a small spray of them for a boutiniere if you caught them early enough. Again, it doesn't fill in enough to be a weed control, but it sure can cover ground at a wide distance. Cynthia

Combining various types of groundcovers in a single area can be risky - one is invariably more aggressive than the other and will eventually overtake the weaker selection. Selecting by flower color is also problematic, as bloom times may differ widely. That said, yellow flowering GC's include Potentilla aurea or neumanniana, various Hypericums (St. John's wort), Lysimachia nummularia (creeping jenny), a number of stonecrops and Lamiastrum (yellow archangel). None can be reliably counted on to bloom simultaneously to the ajuga and both the hypericum and lamiastrum are very aggressive spreaders, taller than the ajuga and will easily overwhelm that planting in time. If happy, the ajuga will likely win out over the others in time, as well. You might do better selecting some taller and more robust type of yellow flowering perennial to compliment the ajuga. In my area, ajuga blooms about the same time as late flowering daffodils - ajuga never forms a dense enough mat to deter bulbs coming through, so that may work also.