Laurie: Agree with Olpea that your peach tree is suffering from bacterial canker. No need for me to take an entire page to explain what it is; Google it yourself and read all about it. Bacterial canker is common on peach trees, and has nothing to do with borers. I dormant spray peaches with copper each season to try to prevent this disease from getting a foothold on my stone fruit trees. A tree with canker at that point on the trunk is a goner, since you can't really prune it off without destroying the tree. I can't get to your photos of the leaves, but if they are dead then so is the tree, regardless of your experience with some other tree that you do not specify. A spring freeze may temporarily cause damage to emerging leaves, but on a healthy tree they quickly recover. So that's not it either. Peach leaf curl is common in climates that have consistently cool, moist spring weather and a slow warmup, but curl must be a relatively rare occurrence in Colorado. Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

Hi fargel - The insects are aphids - you can also see the white molts where they have hatched. They are attracted to excessive nitrogen in plants and suck nutrients from the leaves and stems. A few won't harm the plant but a bad infestation can kill it. Check the undersides of the leaves for aphid gatherings. ;) The link below tells you all about them. Controls vary and include just blasting them off with water and insecticidal soap sprays. The leaf roll is most often a result of inconsistent watering levels and is common with container plants as it is difficult to maintain consistent moisture in them. But it can also be caused by excessing watering if the soil does not drain well. You can search "leaf roll" here and find several discussions on it. It doesn't affect production and can usually just be ignored unless it becomes severe. You can safely remove the yellow leaves (also a sign of watering problems) but the rolled ones will do fine as is. They will straighten out once the watering problem is solved. ;) Good luck with your plants. Dave Here is a link that might be useful: IPM - Aphids

I think everyone here has hit the nail on the head. That was my instinct as well, but I wanted to get a second opinion. Fran35, no I haven't used manure at all in my garden. However I do suspect herbicide damage. I've been checking for whiteflies, aphids, etc but I've had a lot of spiders (that I have to try VERY hard to leave alone lol!) and I haven't seen any so I don't think that's the problem. So I pruned up the bottoms a bit (didn't want to do too much and stress them out more) so they're not hanging down in the soil now. I skipped the mulching for now. I'll save that probably for next month. Until we get well into summer, we usually get a fair amount of rain. I spread some organic tomato fertilizer today and I'll have to water it in tomorrow morning. Hopefully that will help. I just read something about too much nitrogen causing leaf roll but hopefully that's not the case here. With all the rain, I highly doubt it. The thing I suspect that has had the greatest effect on at least the upper leaves might be herbicide damage. Everyone around here has been spraying their yards regularly. I googled herbicide damage and the images look just like what I've got here. The good news is, it's not dying back so they should be just fine. I just hope it doesn't get any worse. I know it must be normal for a little bit of foliage to die off, especially around the bottom where it gets old. Plus I would think it needs to get rid of some to put more energy into the top growth. But it still makes me nervous, being a new gardener and all. Am I right about that? It's my first garden so if I mess something up and lose all my tomatoes, I'm going to be so discouraged. But I know that's how we learn. I'd just rather learn from others and not my own mistakes. lol! So last week we had a bad thunderstorm move through. Wind gusts up to 80mph. Yikes! I've lived in Oklahoma my whole life and I don't think I've ever witnessed wind like that before. It blew our brand new grill out into the yard and banged it up. Sad face :( Anyway, I covered my pepper plants with large clay pots since they're still short enough. They did just fine thankfully. My squash plant was even small enough still to sort of be stuffed into a 3 gallon pot. It probably wasn't too comfy in there, but it didn't get any damage! It's HUGE now so I hope our severe weather is over for the season. The tomatoes had some branches that got blown around so hard that they sort of went limp. Only one small branch actually broke off so I spent an hour or so the next day strapping up the weakened ones. All is well now. Anyway, I brought in my potted plants, including a Better Bush tomato. It's working on it's second fruit set and flowering like crazy. In the last few weeks, since harvesting the first of the fruit near the bottom, the leaves at the bottom of the plant have died back. I left the pot indoors for a couple of days because the weather was still a little nuts. I don't think it liked that at all. The leaves and stems are turning yellow from the bottom up. Even the leaves around the current fruit set. I am not sure what's going on there but I did ad some home made compost to the pot a couple weeks ago. Maybe it's off balance now? I added the same compost to my peppers and squash and they are all doing great, minus a pepper blossom turning yellow and dropping here and there. Just one or two, I'm sure that's normal. They're still producing and the foliage looks fine. I put just a sprinkle of tomato fertilizer in the pot and I'll water that in tomorrow morning as well. One last thought for the night. When I sprinkled the fertilizer around the tomatoes in the garden earlier, I noticed within minutes, ants all over the surface carrying away bits of the fertilizer. Anyone else ever seen that? Should that concern me? I just kinda thought it was neat. Jennifer

Laura, If in ground plants are not affected, I would venture to say it is not insects or disease, although both will show up sooner in stressed plants. What kind of drainage do your containers have? I don't see any drainage holes on the sides and where they are directly on the grass or soil, any holes in the bottom may not be sufficient. How is the growing medium moisture level about 3-4" under the surface of the medium? If you think poking a finger that far down into the dirt might disturb your plants, or the roots are such that you can't get down that far without damaging them, GardenWebber sprouts_honor (Jennifer from Cleveland) had a wonderful suggestion on how to tell whether or not you need to water your tomatoes, and I quote here: "Get a wooden dowel rod (or two) and sink it in the ground near a plant or two and leave it. Pull it out when you think you need to water. If the top is dry and the bottom is a little damp, it's time to water. If it looks dark and feels saturated, wait to water. I use this technique with potted plants that don't like being over watered and it's helpful with in ground plants too." As I said before, the most common cause of leaf roll is water logging. Please let us know. Betsy