edie: There are several diseases that can severely affect apple tree leaves. The most common, in no particular order are: powdery mildew, scab, cedar apple rust, and that great devestator, fireblight. Run these names through your Google and see if you can come up with descriptions and/or photos that match what you have seen on you trees. Your description of disease progession on the trees seems initially to be mildew to me, especially if it was accompanied by a curling of the leaves. Powdery mildew seems to be variety selective, and I have had serious doses of it on my Jonagold trees, but not so much on the others. However, I have had deal with all the diseases I listed above. I've got them all too. The best treatment for powdery midew (and scab too), is one or more dormant sprays with a combination of lime/sulphur with horticultural oil. The oil is for smothering overwintering insect eggs from aphids, scale, and mites, the lime/sulphur is a fungicide. You can also use a copper solution as your fungicide, mixed with the diluted oil. Personally, I prefer copper, using a product called Kocide, but that may be more difficult for you to find in small quantities. I try to apply two dormant sprays; one just at bud break, and one about two weeks before that. Of course, whether you can dormant spray is heavily dependent on weather. You need a fairly warm, calm day, with no rain in prospect for a day or two. If the powdery mildew still appears in spite of the dormant sprays, you can use a spray of pure wettable sulphur (also spelled sulfur; both are correct) during the growing season. There may be some leaf damage from the sulphur, but that is better than the powdery mildew, which can completely defeat the fruiting capability of an apple tree. Wettable sulphur is different from and much finer than the granulated product called garden sulphur, which is intended for incorporation into the soil. Scab damage on leaves is ususually more patchy, while cedar apple rust shows up as brown or yellow spots on the leaves. Fireblight, the worst of all, turns the leaves and twigs black, and causes the ends of new growth to bend over like a shepherd's crook. I have had serious fireblight here on the apple trees, and apply two sprays of Streptomycin early in the season to keep it from getting started, as well as a spray of Ferbam against cedar apple rust which is prevalent in my neighborhood. You may not have to do any of this if your problems are confined to powdery mildew. If the apples on some of your trees are bug-ridden, that is a completely different issue, and will probably call for use of an insecticide after the trees blossom and set fruit. The most common and bothersome early insect of apples is the plum curculio, although you may also have codling moth, which normally strikes later but can continue all season. Some locations also have problems with apple maggot fly. I use several sprays of the insecticides Imidan or Permethrin just as the little fruits are forming, then bag the best apples in ziplock sandwich bags at thinning time (I thin to one apple per cluster) so I don't have to continue spraying them all season long. Peaches are a different kettle of fish, and your peach leaves should not have problems unless you have peach leaf curl (more common in cool, damp Western areas), or possibly a bacterial infection (bacterial spot) on the trees, which also shows up on the fruit. Dormant spray your peach trees too, with oil and lime/sulphur or oil and copper. Plum curculio also attacks little peaches early, usually followed by the oriental fruit moth, so peach trees will also have to be sprayed with effective insecticides to get a crop. All of the above may sound pretty complex, but the important thing is to study your fruit and leaves carefully so you can figure out, perhaps with help from internet searches, just what you have or don't have. It does not hurt to be wordy if you are conveying information that helps to diagnose your problems. But it takes some close observation to describe, and, utimately, solve your problems. Don Yellman, Great Falls, VA

I planted all my wintersown brassica - lettuce, spinach, chard, brocolli, kale, arugula, cabbage - in mid May, and yeah, the weather was crazy. Luckily, all my seedlings survived near-frost temperatures and even hail! I even planted one tomatoe (grown under lights), on May 20 or something like that, and it looked pretty dire for awhile, but it bounced back. All in all, despite the wierd weather which threw off my cukes and peppers, and despite me having done a terrible job at hardening everything off, everything is growing and flowering! Beginner's luck I suppose!

Busy1, You took the words right out of my mouth. I have volunteer pumpkins, squash and tomatoes coming up not only in the garden but right out there in the lawn as well. Apparently the birds and wildlife have been spreading some seeds around. What in the world are we going to do with this crazy weather? I fear if we don't get warm-season crops into the ground ASAP, it will be too hot for them soon if this terrible early warming trend continues. I am going to start my sweet potato slips today. I'm at the point where I don't even know what to do next, and usually I have such a good plan/planting schedule in place that I just roll along like a robot in spring, planting the same things in the same order as every year. Now I don't know if I should trust the weather and plant everything, or stick to my regular schedule and do corn this week, and beans next week, etc. and expect cooler temperatures to return. My gut instinct is that the cold weather is gone, at least in your part of OK and mine since we're so far south, and I think we'd better get busy planting in the ground because the heat/drought is going to wreak havoc upon us this year. I expect my gardening season will end at the end of June because you just reach a point (or at least I do) where it is costing more to water the garden than it is worth in terms of produce. Tim and I have been trying for two weeks to put the cover on the greenhouse, but can't do it on a very windy day and every day and most every night is very windy. I'm starting to think the naked frame of the greenhouse is going to sit there uncovered a long time. I guess at this point it doesn't matter. If the covering was placed over the frame now, the greenhouse would be so hot that I couldn't have much in it. I haven't even bought shadecloth for it yet. Our forecast high is usually in the upper 70s to mid 80s but in reality, our actual high is trending 3 to 5 degrees above the forecast. I keep thinking our thermometers must be wrong, so I buy another one and place is somewhere else in the shade at the proper height. We now have 7 outdoor thermometers and they all pretty much agree with one another (maybe a 1-degree difference between some of them), so for whatever reason, at our house the highs are going higer than forecast every single day. My life is further complicated by the fires. If we have bad fires all week long, I won't have time to plant anything and this is the worst possible time for that because suddenly I feel way behind on warm-season crops and normally I wouldn't even be thinking of putting them into the ground yet. I am at the point where I may not plant any more cool-season crops in the ground. I already have potatoes, onions, shallots, garlic, chives, snap peas, lettuce, Swiss Chard, parsley, cabbage and radishes in the ground, but haven't even put my broccoli in the ground and don't know if there is any point. I think it will get so hot (hey, it's already is!) that the broccoli will bolt quickly, probably long before it normally would. Maybe I'll solve the broccoli issue by planting the Piricicaba which is supposed to tolerate temperatures into the 90s but not plant the Packman. Maybe I'll plant the broccoli in containers in the house. Well, just kidding about that, but at least inside the house the temps would stay below 80 degrees and presumably I wouldn't have to deal with broccoli worms. I'd like to start transplanting tomato plants in the ground. Then, the pepper plants could graduate from the tables on the sunporch to the tables outside on the patio. I also need to start getting corn, beans, squash, etc. into the ground. My soil temps are staying consistently in the 70s this week. If I was sure cooler weather wouldn't return, I could go ahead and plant winter squash, black-eyed peas and watermelon (and sweet potato slips if they were ready). I feel like Alice in Wonderland....I think I fell through a rabbit hole and woke up in a completely different place, and I'm not sure I like it. While it is more comfortable to work outside in warmer temperatures, it is messing up the planting schedules big time. Whatcha gonna do, Robert? If it doesn't rain soon, I don't know how we'll be able to water enough to get a good crop anyway. If something doesn't change, this year's drought will rival the drought of 2005-2006 in much of Oklahoma and that is a very sobering thought. At our house we usually get about 3.5" of rain in March. With the month 2/3s gone, we have received less than a quarter-inch. It isn't time to push the Panic Button yet, but I am starting to get pretty nervous. I see a lot of plowed fields around me but nothing sprouting in them. Dawn

What makes it more difficult is that the freezes usually come after a week or more of 80F+ days so the plants are in active growth. At least if the plants have adjusted to a chill they are less susceptible to injury. After a relatively mild winter, it looks like summer will be blazing hot.