By George! - A Blog!

Three leading lights of the Community Gardens of Tucson spent a day at a recent Farmer’s Market on the University of Arizona Mall. Actually there was only one true farmer there selling local produce, but other booths advertised good things to do with growing your own healthy food, herb plants, royal jelly and honey. […]

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 […]

Perhaps the most exciting part is that squash plants are easy to grow, providing the weather is warm. And for the months of June, July, August, and even parts of September, the weather is warm.
Zuchinni squash are the quickest growing kind of a large family. Winter squashes are, in spite of the name, summer […]

Sometime in early May, when you take a look at your fruit trees and feel happy about a large number of developing fruit, something dreadful happens. A lot of little fruit–maybe all of them in some instances– have left the tree and are lying on the ground.
Why did this happen? Commercial citrus growers […]

Just after the break of dawn something wonderful is happening in the corn patch. Try and be there, and you’ll be amazed.
In the still air the corn tassles will be throwing out clouds of yellow dust and it will be floating down to the silks of the plants. Pollination is happening. If it takes place […]

We’ve had two days of cloudy weather and two nights of steady rain, though in parts of Tucson we’ve had downpours.
Rain has made a difference to our environment; some quite obvious like removing the dust out of the air and from leaf surfaces. Everything looks clean–and it is. The distant mountains come closer and we […]

The bible says “there is a time and a season for all things” and there is a time coming up for planting the warm season plants. We might even say the hot season plants. Apart from the landscape plants, there are four or five vegetable plants that enjoy hot weather and hot soil. […]

For the past three years we have carried out trials to find suitable varieties of vegetables that can be successfully grown in the desert. The findings are passed on to our gardeners when we meet with them and through the newsletters
We determined the best time to set out onion seedlings (not the dried out bulblets […]

Some gardeners like to rely on “magic dates” to make sure they do the right things at the right time but there are dangers to this scheduling.Two such dates come to mind: “feeding” citrus trees on St Valentine’s Day and the last frost date that allows them to go ahead with summer in mind.
The danger […]

Spring is not far away, though local weather conditions may not favor its arrival. What sets it off is the lengthening days, and we have a slight indication of this taking place. Warming temperatures are another influence, and we have fluctuating changes happening that depend on regional weather changes as well as whether we are […]