I don't have Caroline or Anne. I see they are also 'everbearers'. Basically we dug up 200+ starters at my mom's and did the mass planting. Within the plot I have no weed issues as they get totally choked out. However is encroachment on the edges, but nothing a weed whacker and heat wont take care of. By eliminating all of the plant material in the fall I also take care of rabbit hide-outs and keep disease in check. I burn any prunings. In my current situatoin it would have been great to have berries in July too, though. As H-man wrote, and I concur, it's nice to have a summer crop for browsing. We'll see what the 30 degrees did later on, but that's half our crop! Noogy Noogy

buckwheat is a summertime cover crop that I use for weed suppression for 4 week period. it doesn't like cold weather. I am in zone 5 and my winter cover crop is annual rye or cereal rye with tillage radishes or turnips mixed in. you are in zone 7 but I bet it is still to cold for buckwheat

Pam, I do start a lot of seedlings and, oddly, I don't really have a formal plan. One day my mind will just say "you'd better start the _____ seeds now (fill in the blank with whatever it is that day or week)" and so I do it. Some how it all works out. My indoor light shelf in the spare room holds 12-15 flats depending on the size of the flats. When I want to move plants out of the spare room, they can go to the unheated greenhouse, garage, potting shed, porch or sunroom. Or onto tables on the patio, but I cover those with bird netting if left out 24/7 so that possums and other night-roaming creatures don't climb up onto the tables and eat the plants. The general path the plants travel is from spare room light shelf to greenhouse (which is covered year-round with 50% shade cloth) to shaded patio to tables in full sun to the garden. I don't keep a formal list and say "okay, that's a week in the greenhouse, now outdoors to harden off more in shade.....I just wing it. Somehow it works. My system works because I've done it so long that it is just automatic and I don't even think about it. My subconscious mind must keep track of things and just tell my conscious mind what to do. Right now it is saying 'OK, your cucumbers are up, it is time to start seeds of watermelons', so tomorrow I probably will. Our weather has been crazy and I've felt like Alice in Garden Wonderland because everything is so mixed up. We have had warm season reseeding annuals sprout at the same time as cool-season reseeding annuals, which is insane. Usually the warm-season ones don't start sprouting until the cool-season ones already are in bloom. That's just one example of the craziness. Another is that the asparagus starting producing harvestable shoots in January. January! Normally that mostly happens in mid- to late-March, though a warm spell in late February occasionally starts some of the asparagus early. And, it was backwards....usually the purple asparagus is earlier and the green asparagus is later, and this year it was the opposite. This totally defies logic and I don't understand why it happened. And, now the asparagus is finishing up far too early, but we have harvested it for about as many weeks as we do in a normal year---just that the harvest started much earlier than usual. The broccoli has headed up and I'll begin harvesting any day now. The cabbage is heading up, but it takes longer to form heads so it will be a while yet. The collards are huge. I've been having trouble keeping up with the timely harvesting of lettuce, spinach, kale and collards because the heat has made them enlarge abnormally quickly. The early tomatoes in pots have produced two ripe red tomatoes so far, and several more are turning. Usually the first tomatoes are at the end of April. The lettuce got really big really quick and some of it already is trying to bolt, which I blame on a few days with 88-degree highs. However, I have plenty more lettuce plants in flats to plug into bare spots in the garden, so I can yank out some of the lettuce that is trying to bolt. I usually plant leaf, iceberg and romaine for early lettuce and Summer Crisp types for later season lettuce, so none of my SummerCrisp types have gone into the ground yet, though some will be companion-planted with tomatoes tomorrow. I was going to do that today, but it was cool and rainy so I stayed inside and potted up small peppers into larger paper cups. The onions also have loved the early warmth and are the size now that they usually are in mid- to late-May, making me think my little pepper plants are going to be lost in there amongst the gigantic onions when I finally start plugging them into that bed. This week's cooler, wetter weather is a blessing in disguise as it enabled some angry, uncomfortably warm, stalled snap pea plants to relax, grow more and bloom. I was starting to worry the hot weather would get them before they could produce peas. My bush bean plants aren't that old or big, but already have buds and will flower any day now. I don't think we've ever harvested bush beans in April, but it looks like we will this year. I really feel like I fell down the rabbithole and woke up in somebody else's garden. Since late January, I have felt like the garden is running straight ahead, pell mell, right into summer and I am running behind it trying to catch up with it. I just hope all the early warmth isn't a sign of a terribly hot summer to come. I worry that the transition from El Nino to La Nina will be very quick while I'd prefer a slow transition, or even better, a transition from El Nino to neutral conditions instead. Of course, we'll get whatever we get, and we'll just deal with it. All the early warmth didn't mean we escaped late cold nights, but we certainly had fewer late cold nights than we do most years. I never really feel safe until around May 4th (because May 4th is the latest late frost we've had here). Y'all must have gotten out of Ft. Worth just in the nick of time as a horrible hail storm, with hail stones up to the size of softballs (though most of the big ones were "only" golf ball to tennis ball sized) blew through a couple of days ago and damaged northern parts of the DFW meteroplex. It was awful and the video is incredible. One similar storm came very close to us, but sort of went around us and hailed on one county north of us and another northeast of us. As a gardener, hail is my worst weather fear. Dawn

Any idea what the ingredients are? People do grow in 100% compost so it's not unheard of. Depending on the composition, it can cause problems like crusting (which sheds water). And it will shrink as it continues to decompose. I would add topsoil either now or next year to replace the shrinkage, and that will help create a balanced mix. You could always do an experiment: add soil now to one bed and not to another and compare how they do.