When I started off to Farmer’s Market Saturday morning, I noticed that the flowers in the front yard looked a little sad. It has been horribly windy so I figured they had dried out a bit more quickly than I expected and needed a drink. I made a mental note to do some watering when [...]

Gardener’s hands take a lot of abuse. And if you are a gardener like me who likes to forgo gloves, those fingers can feel like sandpaper. One of my favorite ways to combat this problem has always been a sugar scrub. The sugar helps exfoliate all the rough skin and the carrier oil helps lock [...]

Ordering plants online can be a risky business. Although I find gardeners as a whole to be a reputable bunch, I’m sad to say that most disreputable growers have always been in the mail order plant side and now online orders. Just as easy as it was to hide behind a PO Box, these less [...]

Halloween is hands down my favorite holiday. So it makes perfect sense as a gardener to grow a few of my own decorations for the season. I love pumpkins of all shapes, sizes and colors. The more variety I can have, the better. The drawback, however, is that the vines can be huge. The Jarrahdale [...]

It’s easy to miss the changing of the seasons this time of year in California. The hills have been brown for a while so there really isn’t much chance of a seasonal display. The geese aren’t migrating anywhere, but rather take a morning flight around the neighborhood only to settle down at the lake they [...]

Yesterday when I went about starting some seeds, I noticed some fungi growing in a new bag of supposedly sterile seedling mix. I knew you could sterilize soil in the oven, so I did some Google research and came across several methods of sterilizing them in the microwave. Since the oven method would take about [...]

The buds of my newly planted Pink Lady apple are finally starting to open. The Pink Lady was hybridized in Australia and is a cross between a Lady Williams and a  Golden Delicious. One of the later blooming apples here, it ripens in mid-October. I could say that I made my selection based on that [...]

Probably one of the best known companion planting groupings is the “Three Sisters.” As children we were introduced to companion planting along with our Native American studies. Said to have originated with the Iroquois, the “Three Sisters” method of planting combined three staples in the Native American diet, corn, beans and squash. The Story Corn, [...]