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 […]

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. […]

The good gardener that you are means that you’ve completed all your soil preparation and seed sowing and planting. Now you’re waiting for your first harvests of cool season vegetables.
Here’s a way to speed up the first of your fresh fall food. Grow sprouts.
You put seeds in a Mason jar, add water and in […]

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 may be surprising to a lot of people that grapefruit gather a better taste and texture well into the summer months. Usually people get excited around Thanksgiving (maybe because they have houseguests impressed by the homeowner walking out into the yard and picking fruit they have only seen in the supermarkets). Actually, […]

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 […]

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 naturally get excited when we see the first squash fruit, the first corn cob, the first tomato on the vine, the first bean. In fact we get excited about anything that is “the first”. Usually, we eat it.
But there are good reasons not to–unless you live in a desperate situation. Subsistence […]