Carrots -- plant now, and cover with hay in the fall and harvest during the winter. Parsnips work this way too -- harvest parsnips in March before they start to grow again. Savoy cabbage and gigante kolrabi -- plant now and eat during winter (I cover the savoy with agricultural fleece and leave in the garden to eat Dec - Feb, and harvest the kolrabi in late fall and store) Both want many days of growing , so now is a great time to plant (I've got seed trays I planted last week of both.) I also plant rutabagas in mid summer, eat the greens when they're big enough, and then eat the roots in late fall/early winter after at least two hard frosts (mulch well.) parsley -- plant now for fresh winter parsley/walnut pesto. And the basil, as suggested above, and be made into basil/pignioli pesto and frozen. summer lettuce Plus all the great suggestions above. In my Zone 5 garden I have to plant kale now to get a harvest by fall -- and then it lasts all winter under cover (some varieties last better than others -- but all will last a bit into the fall) Good luck!

Sara, I have struggled with the weeds ever since moving to Oklahoma in 1999, and have finally determined that mulching is MORE IMPORTANT in the veggie garden than anything else I do, you know? I see a lot of people in our area who till up the ground and plant a garden in the spring--say about April. The garden looks great as you are driving by. All that lovely brown or reddish-brown soil and all those tiny green shoots in rows. It looks great by mid-May. By early June you see weeds creeping in. By late June the gardens have as much weed and bermuda grass visable as row crops. By July the weeds and grass have won and the veggies are virtually abandoned by the homeowners. Then the same thing happens all over again next year. I can't understand people doing all the work each year to start a garden and then letting the weeds take over. So, every year in my garden I mulch and hand-pull weeds, and every year the weeds are less and less of a problem. Mulching is definitely the key. Now, if I could just "transplant" my weed control success from the veg garden to the rest of my landscape! Susan, I wish the swap were in late June or early July so I could bring bushels of tomatoes and corn and beans! Since the swap is in April, though, about all I can bring is a few letover tomato plants that I didn't have space to plant. If I had planned ahead and planted a lot of cool season crops, I might have had some to share. But I save almost all my space for warm-season stuff, and those plants aren't producing yet. Love-lies-bleeding is very slow to germinate. I always soak the tiny seed in water and sprout it in pots to get it started. I transplant it while it is tiny. I haven't planted any the last couple of years because it usually reseeds itself nowadays. The problem is that I grow 15 or 20 kinds of amaranths/celosias/cockscombs, so I never know for sure just what has reseeded until they get a foot or so tall. Until then they all look alike...well, all the red-flowered ones look pretty much alike...and all the green-flowered ones look pretty much alike, etc., etc. I do love the double blue Japanese morning glory with the picotee edge. I planted it two years ago and it was gorgeous. I haven't tried it since. Simply a space problem. And I do love Grandpa Ott's. It is so beautiful. I noticed that even Wal-Mart has seeds of it now, so guess it it one heirloom that has won full acceptance and has, thus, been successfully saved from extinction. I am waiting for that first ripe tomato. Every day I go and look at the 2 plants that have one fairly large tomato each. I stare at them and try to will those tomatoes to grow faster and ripen sooner. Those big fat green tomatoes stare back at me as if to say "we'll get ripe when we're good and ready and not before". I guess I don't have to tell you that the day they are finally ripe we will have BLTs for lunch AND dinner! Dawn

hi-Bothenjs, with great difficulty- they are one of the hardest pests to get rid of,they are resistant to most insecticides- you have to spray them on the underside of the leaves, with three different alternating types of spray every three weeks from first seeing them, otherwise they quickly adjust to each type of chemical, other than that-bright yellow sticky boards,hung all over your plants near the tips, you catch thousands like this, they stick to the boards,but they breed so fast,every ten to fifteen days they increase to more than treble the amount if left, The only damage they do is to suck the sap from the top of the plant leaves,but the droppings drop down and shower the leaves and fruit which then go mouldy, nasty horrible little creatures, who originated from Brazil, they can stand extreme variations of heat and cold, even frost.

I have really enjoyed reading some of these older threads, there is a lot of good information in them. I really enjoy gardening for wildlife but my gardens are a little behind some of the other posters here. I would love to see pictures of how your gardens have turned out Rita (and anybody else), if you ever get around to it. Re the catbirds - they have always hung around in my yard, because of the plantings and the birdbaths. They seem to take a LOT of baths! This winter I put up a Suet Log right outside a window and the catbirds love the homemade suet mixture, so I get to see them up close and personal. They do seem to be curious about what I'm doing in the yard sometimes, kind of like the Chickadees. I also enjoy their pretty songs when they aren't making that whiny cat sound. Also I dug out an old Burning Bush and replaced it with a 6 foot Serviceberry this Spring (BIG improvement). The berries are ripening and the Catbirds are on the Serviceberry every day. They are fun birds to have around!