Vegetables
We are probably well past any hard freezes so feel free to plant warm season vegetables by seed or as plants. If your garden plot is new or the soil seems hard to work and you're not going to till it, add handfuls of composted manure with each plant. Mulching will help keep the roots cool and delay the weeds. I like to use wheat straw. You can also underplant taller plants (tomatoes, peppers, etc) with a 'green mulch' of lettuce, radishes, herbs, marigolds, borage etc.
Most of the summer vegetables need a lot of sun...6 or more continuous hours of full sun exposure.
Pruning
Prune any shrubs that have finished flowering. For example, forsythia can be pruned. Or not. If you want to control the size of the forsythia, prune by removing a quarter of the main stems, randomly selected from the interior, or cutting the larger, older stems; cut them all the way to the bottom. If you're wanting to take the power hedge shears to them...it may be the wrong plant for that location.
Young dogwood trees can be pruned for deadwood or structure.
Remember the rule of pruning: think twice, cut once; think once, curse twice.
Weeding and pre-emergents
For all the trouble weeds give us, they should be simpler to control. But we have to identify the weeds and their life cycles to control them effectively, and to not waste money or over-medicate the environment.
Weeds can be annual or perennials.
Annual weeds can be winter or summer annuals. The big crop you're seeing now are probably winter annuals like chickweed, henbit, purple deadnettle which germinated in late fall and are coming to maturity. Summer annuals (spurges, bedstraw,knotweed, Japanese stiltgrass etc.) are just little seeds germinating now and you likely cant see them, yet. You can help to prevent annual weeds by distributing a pre-emergent herbicide in fall and spring. Always read the labels and don't over-apply.
Perennial weeds include: ground ivy, dandelion, sedges, plantains, clover. Controlling perennials weeds takes a little more effort, including hand weeding and selective use of post-emergent herbicides.
Here are some links about weeds that might be helpful:
http://www.utextension.utk.edu/publications/pbfiles/PB956part1.pdf?what=pb956part1
http://www.ppws.vt.edu/weedindex.htm
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