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Last fall, I moved to a new home in Palm Springs and began tending the existing plants as well as converting a scruffy back yard lawn area into a vegetable garden. Some of the things I've done may be useful for many of you, especially if you have less-than-ideal soil conditions. Bordering the sides of the my front yard are several rose bushes, about 10 in each row, growing in narrow beds covered with white gravel. They had not been tended for some time, so I began by removing all the dead canes and cutting the rest back to 12-18...

New Year's Greetings to you and may 2010 be filled with success. It occurs to me that my newsletters have often spoken about the many benefits of mycorrhizal fungi and other soil organisms, but there has not been much mention of the details of how those "plant-friendlies" function. Let's begin by planting a seed. As a root emerges and begins to extend downward into the soil, it actually starts a complex sequence of actions. If there have not been any living roots in that garden's soil, as during the winter months in northern climates, then the microbial organisms will have...

In some ways like our political parties, there are a few loud extremists at both ends of agricultural procedures and many quieter degrees of different perspectives in between. At one extreme, some growers approach organic methods with a near-religious fervor. Over at the other end of the spectrum are growers who would spray their crops with anything that promises a fast knock down of every bug in sight. It seems many people make the mistake of thinking that these polar opposites are the "organic" and "conventional" growers, just as in politics where the shouters on the far left and right...

I knew it was going to be a mistake before I ate it. But it was a very appealing-looking slice of tomato on the plate at the restaurant - perfect shape, nice attractive red color. It looked much like those beautiful photos in glossy seed catalogs. So I cut the slice into fourths and popped a wedge into my mouth, hoping that my expectations would be wrong this time. Wrong! While chewing, my taste buds vainly tried to coax something like a tomato flavor from the oddly neutral material. No luck. I sighed and left the remaining pieces uneaten. In...

Well, this should be interesting! My relocation to Palm Springs is hopefully nearing completion - after a near-comical series of blunders by the sellers and mortgage company. I'm sure that some day I'll laugh at the delays in closing on our new home...but not yet. There is a 7x25 patch of scraggly-looking Bermuda grass in the back yard, surrounded by concrete and just begging to become a vegetable garden. As with any organic garden conversion, it calls for a great deal of work at the beginning, followed by little or no effort later. First, the Bermuda grass must go. As...