2024 Yard Posts calendar
The new 2024 Yard Posts food gardening calendar is here! I selected beautiful and honest photos from my yard and elsewhere in Southern California for each month, and I packed in lots of info on vegetables, fruit trees, and watering. For each month, I've got which...
Fuerte avocados for sale
These Fuertes come from large trees on Shady Lane Farm in Fallbrook, San Diego County. A couple of the old Fuerte trees at Shady Lane Farm. Fuerte was brought up from Mexico by Carl Schmidt over 100 years ago, and it is still many people's favorite variety. The owner...
Cocktail grapefruit tree: a profile
My neighbor had a citrus tree that she called a grapefruit, but it made curious fruit: it was the size and shape of a grapefruit but the rind was golden yellow, unlike any grapefruit I’d seen, and the flavor was so sweet that it tasted artificial. How could this be a...
Avocados have brown skin? Here’s why
The spring of 2023 in California was abnormally cool, making avocado thrips abnormally populous. Thrips are tiny insects that chew on avocado fruit as the fruit is small, and this chewing becomes brown scarring. The thrips damage can result in large patches that some...
Supporting The Yard Posts
My goal with The Yard Posts is to help others grow food at home, with a focus on vegetables and fruits -- especially avocados -- in Southern California. How do I do this? I write short articles – “posts” – each Friday, and I augment each post with photos and sometimes...
Growing potatoes in Southern California
Most staples are laborious to get from the ground to a form that you can use in the kitchen. Wheat, for example, takes a lot of work to dry and thresh and grind into flour. Potatoes, by comparison, are not only easy but the harvest can be as fun as finding treasure....
Cher’s garden of gratitude
Cher is 73 now. She’s had both hips replaced – her left hip twice – and she is still working on the flexibility in her new right knee. She showed me how deeply she can squat, which is important for two activities that she loves: gardening and surfing. I met Cher and...
How Brad grew his avocado grove
You and I, we go to the nursery and buy our avocado trees. Not Brad. He is so well-rounded in avocado growing skills and knowledge that he has developed a new grove of hundreds of avocado trees from scratch. Starting from seed Brad planted over 200 avocado seeds,...










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