Gardens Alive, a mail-order company, does still offer a pollinating spray for tomatoes. Generally, bees or insects do the job for you without need for a spray.

But if they don’t, you can easily pollinate tomato blossoms by hand. It’s not hard at all — just tap the open blossoms gently but firmly with your index finger. It’s best to do this two or three days in a row to be sure you hit the exact time when the blossom is completely open.

The main reason that tomato blossoms don’t set fruit this time of year is that the daytime temperature is too high. Although there are a few tomato varieties that have been bred to set fruit at temperatures above 90 degrees F., most just drop off the plant without forming tomatoes until temperatures moderate.

I’ve read that high humidity can also cause blossom drop, but I lived in the South for years and never experienced it.

Shademaster is considered one of the best varieties of honey locust, but it does have two characteristics that it’s important to know about before you add it to your yard: It’s one of the last trees to leaf out in the spring and one of the first to lose its leaves in fall.

However, June is very early for this process to start, even in a hot-weather area. So I’m guessing that your problem may be due to insects, which often cause leaf loss on honey locusts.

Check the leaves on the tree, especially the undersides. You may want to take several to a local nursery with a knowledgeable staff and see if they can help you identify the pest.

Spider mites and aphids are two possibilities. Leafhoppers, galls, and webworms can also be troublesome on honey locusts. Borers can, too, although they don’t show up on the leaves; they enter the tree through the bark. So check for trunk damage (from lawn mowers, string trimmers, etc.), too.

You should also contact the New Mexico State University Extension Service. (You can find a local office at http://cahe.nmsu.edu/county. The experts at these offices will know what particular problems are plaguing trees locally.

Hen and chicks (Sempervivum) are among the easiest plants to grow from Texas to Canada’s Zone 4. You’ll be successful with them outdoors if you plant in full sun and well-drained soil. As with cacti, they don’t like shade or soggy ground.

They’re good container plants, indoors and out. When grown as a houseplant, be sure to give them sun or very bright light and don’t overwater. Let the soil dry completely before watering again.

If you’ve killed houseplants in the past by watering too much, use a potting soil that’s just for cactus.

Although grown mostly for the succulent rosettes, mature plants do bloom. And another nice thing about hen and chicks – they’re drought-tolerant.

So enjoy your new evergreen plant and have fun with it. It will expand as it grows.

The most common reason is that it isn’t receiving enough sun. Crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica) isn’t a plant that’s happy if it gets just morning sun, for instance. It needs to be in full sun at least eight hours daily. 

Often a young crape myrtle is planted in full sun but over the years, nearby trees grow and we unfortunately discover what a difference a few hours of shade can make.

Another cause of nonblooming crape myrtles is improper pruning, or pruning at the wrong time.

Southern Living magazine calls this “crape murder.” But they give detailed advice on the proper way to prune. 

Other than gradually removing lower limbs to create a tree effect, it’s best to prune crape myrtles very little. Plant them where they have room to grow, or choose cultivars that stay relatively small, if your space is tight. (Crape myrtles are also fairly easy to transplant from a shady spot to a sunny one.)

Finally, winter weather can damage crape myrtle, especially on the northern reaches of its hardiness zones. In spring after an extra-hard winter, you may think that your shrub or tree has been damaged beyond return. But don’t give up too soon.

Crape myrtles are among the last shrubs to leaf out, and will often surprise you by showing signs of life as late as in June, although they’ll skip flowering that year.

The National Arboretum, which has released some outstanding crape myrtles, has an informative site that will tell you everything you need to know about crape myrtles.:

http://www.thriftyfun.com/tf23977438.tip.html

Relax! Your Dicentra isn’t dying. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to. It goes dormant – dies back to the ground – each year after it blooms. Then next spring it pops back up and does the same thing all over again. It can certainly be a surprise if you aren’t expecting it.

Possibilities include rabbits, squirrels, deer, and woodchucks. Dogs sometimes eat the flowers, but generally leave the stems alone. Tortoises may also cause damage but probably aren’t big enough to reach the top blooms.To try to help the plant recover, keep it watered and in the sunshine. Use a water-soluble fertilizer once a week.

To help prevent further attacks, consider spraying the plant with an animal repellent. (Ask at a garden center for recommendations.) You’ll need to respray each time it rains.

You may also want to watch and see if you can figure out which furry critter did the damage. For many, just moving the plant up on a stand or shelf may be all that’s needed.

It would be helpful to know if you own an evergreen magnolia tree or a deciduous magnolia tree or shrub (one that loses its leaves in fall).Also, whether you live in a climate where the flower buds may be getting killed. (Sometimes “microclimates” in a yard can mean your plant is harmed by frost (or protected from it) when the opposite is true for your neighbors.

You don’t say whether your tree has ever bloomed. A common Southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora), the large evergreen tree, can take from 15 to 20 years to bloom the first time.

This is often true if you buy a small tree that’s just marked “magnolia” (or dig a young tree from your woods). Or if it was grown from seed. It’s always better to buy a magnolia that has a cultivar name (’Edith Brogue’ or ‘Little Gem,’ for instance). Named magnolias are bred to bloom when young.

Both evergreen and deciduous magnolias prefer sun and will bloom less when they’re in shade.

Are you fertilizing? If not, spread an acid granular fertilizer (such as the kind sold for azaleas, camellias, and rhododendrons) in a large circle around the base of the tree once in early spring and water in well.

If you’re fertilizing frequently, the plant may be putting on new growth at the expense of blooms, so it would be good to stop and see if that helps.

Watch out for drainage, too. Magnolias don’t like to stand in water.

Click on this link for good information on Southern magnolias and here for answers to magnolia questions by the National Arboretum.

When plants don’t bloom, there’s usually a laundry list of possibilities. In the case of an evergreen azalea growing in a container, these include too much shade, an excess of nitrogen fertilizer (which results in much plant growth at the expense of bloom), deer or rabbits, and a late spring frost or cold spell that killed the buds.But the two most likely causes are drought (or too little watering) the previous summer, when the flower buds are formed, and the plant being potbound (the roots forming an impenetrable mass in the container).

You don’t mention what size container the plant is growing in. If it’s the same one you bought it in, it’s certain to need repotting after three years.

To be sure, remove the plant from the pot and check the roots. Or look at the hole at the bottom of the pot – can you see roots growing out there? If so, it’s time to replant - either in a bigger container or in the ground (since you live in a region where azaleas thrive outside).

Azaleas like acid soil that’s moist but well-drained. It should be loose and crumbly. For a container, you can mix up your own, if you like: Use half commercial potting mix made with peat moss and half fine pine bark.

Have the soil mixture thoroughly soaked through before you plant. Then remove the azalea from its pot and tease the matted roots so the ends are loosened from the ball several inches. This will allow the roots to grow out into the new soil. (If you don’t loosen the roots when repotting, they often just keep growing around the around as they were, and your problem continues.)

Place the azalea at the same depth that it grew before or just slightly higher. (Never deeper.) Add 1 inch of mulch over the top of the soil. Then place in partial (not deep) shade.

Fertilize once with an azalea-camellia fertilizer and water when needed to keep the soil from drying out.

Spring is the best time for replanting. When planting in the yard, choose a spot with partial shade and loose, acid soil that can be kept moist.

There can be numerous reasons why a plum tree drops its fruit before it ripens: insects, disease, high winds, and stress ( too much water, too little water, lack of nutrients, poor drainage, weed competition, and excessive shade, for example). But the most common reason — especially when, as you say the tree is heavily laden — is that the tree has produced more fruit than it can support. If this happens again, you’ll want to thin the fruit. I realize that removing perfectly healthy fruit from a tree goes against everything a gardener believes! But getting rid of the excess ensures that a good crop of nice-size plums will stay on the tree until maturity. Think of it in the same way as you might thinning radishes that were sown too thickly.

When the fruit reaches about 3/4-inch in diameter, pick off extra plums so that the ones that remain are about 4 or 5 inches apart.

Also, whenever you’ve had insect or disease damage around fruit trees, always rake up and remove from the area any debris (old leaves, etc.) from the ground. This helps break the cycle.

Whichever type of spring beauty you have that didn’t perform up to expectations – from a dogwood to a flowering plum – it’s always a disappointment. Where are some possible reasons:

• Too much shade. If the tree needs full sun (redbuds do; dogwoods don’t, for instance), it may not be getting it because taller trees have grown or a new structure is blocking the light.
• Too much fertilizer. If the tree is planted in the lawn and you fertilize the grass several times a year, the tree is getting fertilized, too – and often overfertilized.
• Pruning at the wrong time removed the flower buds.
• Freeze damage over winter or a late spring frost that followed a warm spell killed the buds
• Insects or diseases. If you suspect this is a possibility (look at the tree closely), check with your local Extension Service office or your favorite nursery.

The best time to prune all spring-flowering shrubs is right after they stop blooming and the flowers fade. The reason for that is that the plants will be developing flower buds over the summer. Those will produce next year’s flowers. So if you trim the plant back in summer, fall, or winter, you’ll be depriving yourself of next year’s blossoms.Rather than drastically cutting back an overgrown azalea, it’s best to cut back to about 12 inches one-third of the oldest stems. Do this again next year and the year after. Then your plant will be a good size and renjuvenated.

You may want to try a combination of tactics: First, spray the area thoroughly with a hose to dilute the scent, which will attract other dogs. Then temporarily put up a barrier – such as chicken wire – so the dog can’t get close to the shrub. You may want to try spraying a product sold to repel cats and dogs (be sure to respray it after every rain). If grass at the base of the boxwood was damaged, dig it up and replant.