Growing fruit trees in Southern California
April is a dynamic time to talk about fruit trees -- as they are all blooming and flushing -- and this last week I did so as the monthly speaker for the Ocean Hills Garden Club in Oceanside. When allotted only an hour to cover "Growing fruit trees in Southern...
How to outsmart garden weeds
Weeding the garden is not mindless work. This struck me the other day when my wife was helping in the garden and I saw her do what we all instinctively do to a weed: rip it out of the ground. That's generally a fine thing to do with a small weed, but this was a big...
Growing and harvesting lettuce in Southern California
Gardening as sport: This year, I took the challenge of growing more lettuce than my brother’s family could eat. He and my sister-in-law fuel their family of six with a quasi paleo diet, which includes a lot of lettuce, and they would be spending a week at our house in...
What’s the best kind of avocado to grow?
This question is unanswerable in an objective sense. But I'm game to attack it with a fun and practical twist: I'm imagining that I just moved into a new house with a blank yard . . . One tree: Hass If I had the space for only one avocado tree, I would plant a Hass....
Rain is coming! How do I garden?
I get frantic when rain is forecast. Southern California doesn’t get rain often, so I really feel the need to take advantage of each event. Rain provides ideal conditions for certain garden tasks. Some are best done just before the rain starts, some during the...
Don’t cut off the fruiting wood: Pruning lesson number one
The first time I pruned a plum tree, I climbed into it and started snipping off stubby branches that looked good for nothing. They were kind of in my way too, snagging on my shirt. Hmm, the plum tree didn't flower much that year. It set only six plums in total....
The Quetzal and the Wild Avocado
Our guide through the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve in the highlands of Costa Rica had just picked up a fallen orchid to show us when we heard a whistle. He put the orchid down and started walking briskly toward the whistle. We followed. He turned back to...
The sucker frost
Both my plants and I got suckered by this week’s frost. I had gone up to Oregon and Washington, not thinking any plants in my yard would need protection while I was gone. It was snowing up north, and I thought of returning to Southern California as returning to...
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