I was able to make a small wreath with my Silver Mound Artemisia and the plants seems to be coming back even though I cut them pretty severely in order to get enough for a wreath. If I want to try a different, more productive kind next year (for bigger wreaths, and lots of wreaths), what is generally considered to be the best variety to use? Silver Queen? Silver King? Powis Castle? And where can I find those varieties? I've never seen them at any of my local nurseries.

Unless the parent tree was own root the sucker yours came from is the sweet cherry rootstock and not the named cultivar that was presumably grafted onto it. Either the rootstock seedling happens to be a yellow cherry as well or the whole parent tree, including the roots was the yellow cultivar. Sweet cherry is actually a weed species in this region and suckers to form groves on local wooded hillsides, where it even overtakes and overtops the native red alder trees often present in quantity on the same sites. It also crosses with the much less exuberant, native bitter cherry to produce a nearly fruitless, intermediate hybrid called Puget cherry. Some ~tall examples of the latter are conspicuous when in bloom, on undeveloped land between I-5 and Lakeside School (near Seattle). It is usual to have problems with suckering and bony surface roots with plantings of sweet cherries - perhaps all the more so when these are present as rootstocks for Japanese flowering cherries. All you can do is uncover the bases of the suckers and saw them away. If there are horizontal runners that lead back to the original planting follow these back to the parent tree and saw them off at their points of origin, pull the rest up. You don't, of course want to saw off normal roots of the parent tree - just the ones that are suckering runners like aspen trees and running species of bamboos produce. This post was edited by bboy on Sat, Mar 15, 14 at 17:05

I'm only struggling with hardening off of my peppers, none of my other veggie seedlings are having a problem. They are in 4" pots, and I haven't overwatered. And, some of the pepper varieties have done fine. I guess the peppers, especially some varieties are more sensitive. I've kept them in the shade in a porch area that gets a little bit of afternoon sun, and monitored the amount of sun. We did have a few windy days. Maybe next year it's worth investing in one of those little greenhouse shelves, to offer the seedlings more protection? Smokemaster, thanks for the offer of seeds, I did start everything from seed and still have more seeds, but I think it's just too late. I am going to a large farmers market in VT this weekend, maybe I'll get lucky and find some interesting varieties. Northerner, thanks for the website link, it is a good reminder!

I'd say it's Cat's Ear, Hypochaeris radicata in the first picture, rather than a thistle. In the second you have Dandelion foliage, Taraxacum sp. and subsp. and also White Clover, Trifolium repens. Non- chemical means of control would be mowing to prevent flowering, improving the grass to crowd them out and grubbing out by hand. If you want to use chemicals you could spot weed individual plants rather than douse the entire lawn with herbicide.