Also, pole beans looked pretty good until the other day. Now they are looking distressed.

TRanger,

Without being able to see them, all we can do is guess.

BROCCOLI: On the broccoli, it could be another round of caterpillars feeding at night (or during the day) or it could be another leaf-eating insect like grasshoppers. To kill caterpillars on all plants in the cole family (broccoli, cauliflowers, kale, cabbage, etc.), you can spray with a Bt product like Thuricide at the intervals recommended on the product label. It is organic and only affects caterpillars. You have to spray consistently throughout the season and not wait until the plant leaves look like Swiss cheese. This late in spring, I wouldn't bother spraying because the plants are at the end of their productive period. Once it gets as hot as it has been this week, broccoli is about done....

FLOWERING BROCCOLI: That's why you're getting the yellow flowers. The broccoli we harvest is just the immature flowerheads. Once it gets as hot as it has been this week, the plants start sending up flowers, so yes, remove that one. (Some people cook the broc with flowers and eat it, but I don't.) If you have broccoli heads that haven't begun to flower yet, harvest it soon because this hot weather will make it flower any day now.

CURLED TOMATO LEAVES: On tomatoes, physiological leaf curl or leaf roll is a stress reaction, and usually it is stress caused by heavy rainfall or overwatering or by sudden hot temperatures, or sudden very cold temperatures. However, it can be a reaction to any stress of any kind, including high wind or the use of herbicides that may have drifted onto the plants from elsewhere. Check your soil around the tomatoes several inches below the surface and see if it is terribly wet. If it isn't, then I'm guessing the leaf curl might be more related to this week's heat wave, even if it started out as a stress reaction to the recent heavy rains. Normally, once the source of stress is gone, the leaves return to normal.

CUKES AND SQUASH: My best guess is something transient is eating them...it flies or creeps in, eats and leaves. In my yard, based on what I'm seeing right now, it could be very small grasshoppers---the ones I'm seeing here are 1/2" long and are chewing holes in all kinds of leaves. WIth cukes and squash, it could be almost anything as lots of insects attack them. Check the undersides of the leaves for clusters of tiny insect eggs, and scrape them off the leaves if you see them. If they are tiny red eggs, they are squash bug eggs. On cucumbers, the most commonly seen insects include cucumber beetles, aphids, leaf miners, squash bugs and, ocasionally, pickle worms. You can treat the plants with any insecticide labeled for use on cucumbers. If you want to go the organic route, Spinosad seems effective on a broad range of insects.

POLE BEANS: How has their appearance changed? Wilting of foliage at mid-day through mid-afternoon? Change in color of foliage? Brown or yellow spotting? Give me some idea how they look now compared to before.

Dawn

My garden looks terrible too! The strange thing is that in spite of how bad my tomato plants look, most of them are blooming and many of them have tomatoes. In fact I counted 15 on one of the Celebrity tomato plants. We've eaten two Early Girl tomatoes and two have been eaten by the birds. The plants seem to suffer from about everything I've seen mentioned here from curling leaves to yellow leaves to spots to one plant that barely has any leaves left at all because something has been eating them, but every single one is still putting on new growth and blooms and the new growth looks healthy. So I'm crossing my fingers, trying to keep everything watered well in this heat, and hoping for the best. The peppers are all blooming and look pretty good compared to the tomato plants. I'm doing the bag garden (per the book 'Starter Vegetable Gardens' by Barbara Pleasant). It's going to be an interesting experiment. Oh, and to top it all off, we had hail tonight so there is no telling what the plants look like now .... I'll find out in the morning.

Suzie

My tomatoes are still looking pretty good despite the heat wave. They are planted in white buckets, not black, and are still blooming and producing. Haven't had a ripe one yet, but any day now should have a few Jet Star and Rutgers.

I potted up seedlings of Victorian Dwarf and Lime Green Salad, and need to pot up the Burpee Big Beefsteak (I think that's the name). Seems they were just at a standstill in the seed containers and wouldn't grow anymore. So, decided to pot them up despite them having short roots that did not fill the seed pots. They are taking off now. Could have been lack of nutrients, but believe me, I will never use the Perfect Mix sold by Walmart ever again for tomatoes. Everything else did okay in it, but not the tomatoes. Tons of little mushrooms kept popping up all over the place. The Black Cherry seedlings are not going to do anything I don't believe. They barely have the first true leaves on them. I may go ahead and put them in the Sta-Green potting soil and see if I can salvage them. I really, really wanted to grow this tomatoe. Can it be planted for the fall? If I can find a reasonably priced plant online, I am tempted to order two or three to see if I can get them to grow. But, don't recall the DTM on it. Anyway, both the Victorian Dwarf and the Lime Green Salad are taking off now in their new pots and better soil.

Some seeds did fine in the Perfect Mix, but it was so inconsistent, I will not use it again, and don't recommend it to anyone else. It just happened to be the only potting soil I could easily get in the winter months. Will get some Sta-Green in the fall to use for my winter sowing next year.

Found a very small Salt Marsh caterpillar on my Esperanza the other day and tried to move him to another legume that was bigger, but lost him in the effort. Hope he finds something else to eat. These are the cutest caterpillars.

My Xmas Cassias are finally taking off in the heat, as are the Tropical Milkweeds, Wild Senna, Verbenas, Salvias, Zinnias, Daturas, Pentas, Lavendar, new Lantanas, Phlox 'Wanda' (gorgeous deep lavendar blooms like the paniculatas, one of the parents), Red Porterweed. Gilia capitatas are blooming, and a few blueberries are starting to turn. A lot were knocked off in the hail storm, but I consider that nature's pruning because they are only 3rd year plants.

The Hop Tree (Ptelea trifoliata) is starting to sprout new foliage at the top where the hail "pruned" it back, and I now will have to grow it as a shrub rather than a tree, which can be done with this small tree, thankfully.

The Hops Vine (different thing) is starting to resprout from the ground. Moonflower seeds are growing fine now, they sprouted right after the hail storm. Butterfly bushes are starting to bloom.

The Cestrums are taking off, the purple one, Bacchus, having already bloomed once. The night-blooming Cestrum should not bloom until late summer, so not looking for too much from it yet.

My Salvia elegans 'Golden Delicious' is looking great with that beautiful, lime green foliage. It had a bloom stalk a couple of weeks ago - thanks to greenhouse growing, because their normal bloom time is fall. I had put it in too much sun and a lot of leaves got sunscald on them. I removed all of them, and the new growth has filled out on it now.

The Indian Pinks are blooming beautifully in the shade.

I have baby Red Admiral butterfly caterpillars making tiny little nests on the False Nettle, Black Swallowtail cats on the fennel, Pipevine Swallowtail eggs all over the pipevine in the back yard, and Sleepy Oranges on the Wild Senna in the front. Looking like a great butterfly year.

So not all of the garden is in poor condition. I am trying to look at all the good. Not everything does badly in a heat wave, and not all does good in cooler temps. Every year is a new year with something to impress my senses.

Susan