By George! - A Blog!

Our Community Gardeners are busy sowing seeds of cool-season vegetables. Some like to grow flowers but growing them from seed is a waste of time because there are so many young plants available in the nurseries and you can see what you are getting. If you have special seeds of certain flowers you […]

The middle of November has given us some cool night-time temperatures–and the daytime temperatures are also cooling, but a little more slowly. This is good news for man and beast, and our plants.
Leaves of deciduous vines, shrubs, and trees will be falling soon, and its the cool weather that triggers this change. As […]

Every October I start my sweet pea garden. This is the flowering fragrant kind, not the edible kind that you eat—pods and all.
They will flower in a multitude of colors in early February (which we call spring) and my motivation is to get a good early bloom before my daughter in South Texas gets […]

All of us expect a return on the investment of energy we spend on plants as well as the money we used to buy them. We need to plan ahead,and to do this sensibly we need to know how long it will be before we get the expected return.
In the case of annual vegetables […]

In the middle of September things start looking and feeling better. There’s a general cooling with the shorter days and we’re getting cooler nights–which is always good for man and beast and plants, too.
But the days are sunny and this helps to keep the soil warm for the next month or so. The soil […]

It???s an easy thing to do if you want to copy a particularly good fruit tree. Basically, you take a piece of it and grow it separately. Springtime is the best time for this operation because there???s a life force that activates plants and gets them out of winter dormancy as the days lengthen and […]

Wintertime, when the trees are leafless, is when mistletoes comes to our attention. During the summer, when the trees are full with foliage, the parasite is hidden but all the time it is stealing nutrients and water.There are several kinds of desert mistletoes and each kind has male and female plants. If you look closely […]

Because of the continuing cold weather it???s appropriate to write yet again on the effects of frosts and freezes. If it warms up next month I???ll write about something else.Recently, I was invited into a lady???s bedroom. This was in the middle of the day and there were witnesses, so it???s not what you might […]

December and the New Year is a good time for a chore that we often avoid because we are busy with other things. Yet it is an opportunity to enlist the help of visiting family members and friends. It???s called Seasonal Tool Care Time..It???s a slack time for actual gardening and the tools themselves are […]

Reader Questions
Q: I found your earlier article on dates very interesting but I’m not sure how much I need to thin the many bunches I have on my tree. I’ve lost your article and I wonder if you could please go over the procedure again.
A: Better than that, I now send you a […]