Novice, if your soil is alkaline, your hydrangea is going to bloom PINK! You can add something to the soil to make it more acidic (causing BLUE flowers) but so far, I am in the mid-south area and I've always had blue flowers on my hydrangeas that I plant outside. It's possible a rabbit is nibbling at the hydrangea leaves if it's only down low. When my hydrangeas start to bloom, the buds are a cream color. As they open the blue color fills in. So that may be why your buds are rust color (going to be pink when fully open) Good luck. Maybe the link below will help you out! Here is a link that might be useful: About hydrangeas

My thoughts: You have a nut grass problem right there and it will take over the rose bush before summer ends. While it is still cool enough to work outside, you need to remove the infected soil and work in compost or clean topsoil. You may find it easier to dig up the rose then take care of the nut grass. Few products are effective at the killing the stuff and what does work costs twice as much as you paid for the bush. The cracks in the soil suggest lack of moisture and/or settling. We've had lots of drying winds the past few weeks which really take their toll on new growth, soil moisture and blooms. Increasing the water and mulching with a forest product will help retain the moisture and keep the roots cooler. Gravel or rock isn't a good mulch in this area. It retains heat and reflects sunlight. Chelated iron helps if the rose is chlorotic but this bush doesn't actually look that way. If the rose fertilizer already had iron in it, you don't need to apply more until next fall when new growth starts. Plan to stop fertilizing the rose when we hit 100F for 3 days running to allow the rose to finish the bloom cycle and direct it's energy towards surviving the heat, spider mites and drying winds of summer. Is that a metal stake by the rose? If so, replace it, if needed, with wood or a plastic coated tree stake that doesn't burn the new foliage or reflect sunlight. Hope this helped! Jeannie Cochell, Consulting Rosarian

Well i cant seem to get these pics to show. My white habs that are about 1 month old and up until today were looking great but when i got home from work 2 plants had brown spots on the leaves it almost looks as if they are dried brown spots fairly nice size spots I might add. I will figure out how to get these pics on here but i hope that this sounds familiar to someone because I would sure hate to lose any seedlings

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/tomato Might want to post in the Growing Tomatoes forum, rather than the Tomato Pests & Disease forum. The former gets much more traffic. There's a couple things I see off hand that could be a problem. One is that a 5 gallon bucket is pretty much the bare minimum sized container that you'd want to grow full-sized tomato plants in. 10-15 gallon would be much better. The plants quickly get root bound and stressed much quicker and need watered and fed much more often in smaller containers. Dwarf plants will do okay in 5 gallon buckets. Can't tell if there are spots on the leaves or not but early blight or one of the many other fungus/disease that tomatoes get is a possibility. The treatment for all is the same though. Remove the affected leaves and start spraying with a fungicide. Also, general color of the plants, unless it's due to the camera, look anemic to me. Have you fed them at all? Rodney