Don’t give up yet! There is still time and hope that you can get your garden and flowers planted!

For some reason, it seems like people are about to give up on gardening this season but don’t let a little rain stop you! There is still plenty of time to plant a vegetable and flower garden and the garden centers still have lots of good stuff to plant.

It’s probably too late to plant the cool crops such as lettuce, spinach and peas. It’s not too late to get corn, squash, tomatoes, peppers and all of the other warm crops in the ground.

When it comes to planting, sometimes I have to break my own rules as I did this past week. My research project on evaluation of annuals was way behind planting schedule due to the weather. Go figure. Also, despite the soil being less than perfect for planting, the Master Gardeners of Clark County and I worked as quickly and carefully as possible and planted more than 200 annuals in the trials.

The goal was to get them planted with minimal impact on the soil. We were very careful to keep traffic out of the beds as much as possible. It was a challenge and much more difficult for the people planting but its finished. Phew.

I am sure many of you did the same thing because after all, it is spring and it’s time to plant. Farmers on the other hand, have been less fortunate as they can’t get into the fields with the equipment without major soil compaction.

Keep your fingers crossed for some drier, warmer weather so that the farmers can get their fields planted. Since we had a pretty wet spring, I expect quite a few diseases will show up on a variety of plants in the landscape. I am already seeing signs of sycamore, ash, and maple anthracnose as well as some fireblight on pears in the lower part of the Miami Valley area.

In addition, this could be a great year for crabapple scab and frogeye leaf spot on crabapple.

The pathogens that cause these diseases infected the plant earlier in the spring. For instance, fireblight on pears enters the plant during blossoming, through the blooms. The anthracnose pathogens typically infect the plant when the buds are beginning to develop. Therefore, when you start to see the signs and symptoms of the disease, it’s too late to do anything about it this season.

Unfortunately, this is a great spring for diseases that like cool moist weather to develop.

Pam Corle-Bennett is an Ohio State University Extension horticulture educator and the state Master Gardener volunteer coordinator.