[jyl]

I'm getting to this thread late - as I am to my garden. We hardly had a spring this year, just rain and gloom through May. During a brief decent patch in early April, my son and I planted the boxes with lettuce, carrots, spinach, and other seeds. Only the carrots took. I planted a couple of basil starters. They look sickly. I planted four tomato starters. Two look good although they haven't grown much, two are sickly. The long rainy spring seems to have brought on a bunch of rust. We took out one rose plant, pruned another back to stumps, and have been treating the others, and the tomato plants. So the 2010 garden got off to a very bad start. But things are looking up a little. The weather is improving, it was actually hottish for one day recently. I've yanked the sickliest of the basil and planted more starters. Planted a mess of lettuce and other starters where the seeds failed to germinate. And one interesting surprise - a pea plant leftover from last year has turned itself into a pea bush, that's all I can call it, densely sprouted with hundreds of miniature pod peas. I don't know if they'll be edible but it is cool anyway. The strawberry plants which produced almost nothing last year spent the winter propagating, and now we have lots of promising little strawberries starting to grow. Our blueberry bushes, only a year old, are starting to produce a few fruits, these are still 3-4 years from being real producers but it is a start. Last year's onions are coming back, the hop vines are filling out - only decorative, but it adds to the feeling that the garden is trying to make it a season after all. We're not giving up on 2010.