I was amazed today when I went outside and found strawberry plants, only five but considering the conditions I was amazed any lived as this was a new house (to us) in September I unaware of them, so not mulched, what's more I found rasberry canes too, doh! and to think I ordered more in Feb and they are now shipping to me! could have saved myself some money!

Here in Madison, Wisconsin, our raspberries are beginning to leaf out. This is despite a cool and overcast spring. My experience has been that raspberries are pretty hardy with regard to frost, they will withstand a light frost with little or no damage. Two days of freezing weather would be something else-I would not expect the raspberry leaves to survive. You might be able to cover your raspberry transplants with a 5 gallon plastic bucket, in the event of a hard frost. That would likely give good protection, even if you had to prune back the canes a bit to make the bucket fit.

Bodica, I don't have any photos of the cane borer(or is it saw fly?)Try googling but there's not alot of info. You are supposed to see 2 tiny vampire like punctures in the cane where the adult laid eggs. The the stem turns black as the borer burrows down. On some canes it appeared to attack emerging leaf buds and then a dark spot appeared at that site. The first thing you see is a wilted stem tip. If you can catch it at that point you're ahead of the game. You need to cut down until you can't see a hole in the cane. I read they burrow in the first year and winter over then go all the way down the cane to destroy it and then emerge the next spring. If it is saw fly rather than cane borer I think this is different as Regina said. I'm actually rather unclear about this. I'm just cutting off everything that is black or wilted. If I get a chance soon I'll take a picture of the damage. It's mostly cut off now. I think the fires are getting better here. The smoke certainly is. We are lucky to be pretty far from the danger zone. I can't believe how hard the fire fighters have been working. I'm sorry to hear that we lost one. Thonotorose, I don't know about the freezing. If they overwinter it seems they could stand some freezing and survive. Also for me it is impractical. My garden is quite huge with many roses.

3 things. Use Epsom salts instead of table salt with vinegar and dish soap. It fertilizes instead of poisoning the soil. I don' t know high EC water. Please enlighten me. Glyphosate was thought to be harmless to animals, because the chemical pathway it uses in plants doesn't exist in animals. True, as far as it goes. What we have learned since the early days is that there are two chemical pathways in animals that it does affect. This can not only harm us, but it is harmful to our intestinal microbes. This disrupts digestion. I agree that gardeners should try to avoid glyphosate use, but we really need to get it banned for agricultural uses too. It is common practice to spray crops like grains with glyphosate a few days before harvest. This kills the plant, making harvest more efficient with higher yields. Cost effective for the producer, but contaminates our food and is poisonous to the planet.