Volunteers show when to plant vegetables
I brought this ‘Clarimore’ zucchini plant back from a tour of Brijette Peña's urban farm, where she grows vegetables for seed and trials varieties for her San Diego Seed Company. Peña sold it to me as a seedling in a four-inch pot. But when I got home that afternoon I...
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Growing corn in Southern California
More than any other vegetable, growing corn makes me feel like I’m farming -- not gardening, but farming. It's partly because corn is a big plant. It’s one of the few vegetables that stands taller than you. And corn is usually grown in some arrangement of multiple...
read moreFree talk on Home Food Gardening
This evening (Tuesday) I'll be joining the San Diego Geranium Society to talk about Home Food Gardening -- growing vegetables and fruit trees. Visitors are welcome! The meeting begins at 7 p.m., we'll discuss the topics for around an hour, and it's held in Room 101 of...
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Messages from your deciduous fruit trees after the chilly winter
Deciduous fruit trees demand to spend their winters in certain ways. Peaches, plums, apricots, apples, cherries, nectarines, they like to get chilly in the fall, then shed their leaves and stay chilly for a certain length of time, then warm up in the late winter or...
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Pruning avocado trees to keep them small
I think of my Hass avocado tree as small even though it is far bigger than the newly planted trees above. As I looked at my Hass last week, it stood 17 feet tall. It was time to prune. I prune it every year in order to keep it down to 15 feet. This post is about...
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Spring Collection of Yard Posts, 2019
Spring has sprung! After a relatively long, rainy, and chilly winter for Southern California, plants are bursting their buds to soak up some sun. I can't recall a winter around here that actually lasted until the end of the calendar winter. But March 20 has passed and...
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Would you rather garden in the tropics?
A couple weeks ago I grew tired of protecting baby mango trees from frost and of watching more leaves on my banana plants brown due to cold nights. This has been a persistently chilly and rainy winter for us in Southern California. At my house, only once did we go a...
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The Lamb/Hass avocado tree: a profile
In 2013, I planted a Lamb/Hass avocado tree because its fruit was said to be ready for harvest in summer. I didn’t know much else about the variety, and I’d never tasted its fruit (knowingly). During the past five or six years I’ve learned a lot more about Lamb --...
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I'm Greg. My goal is to help others grow some food at home, with a focus on vegetables and fruits -- especially avocados -- in Southern California. I write a new "Yard Post" every Friday. Buy signs for fruit trees
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