Vegetable Gardening for the Lazy

...are a handsome, large plant that produces one of the most delicious of all vegetables. 4. Prickly Pear Cactus (Opuntia ficus-indica). We won’t natter on about this one, as we’ve covered the edible leaves here, jam making with the fruit here, avoiding the spines here and penned a very early potty-mouthed love letter to the plant here. Needless to say, a plant that needs no added water or fertilizer and grows in dismal, alkaline soil while producing...

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Straw Bale Gardening Update

...ppointment Syndrome or TDS for short. TDS recognizes a unspoken reality of vegetable gardening: that for every lush and productive tomato plant there exists at least ten spindly, diseased specimens hiding in backyards. Without careful soil stewardship, just the right amount of water and diligence about not growing tomatoes in the same place every year TDS will visit your household. Since I’ve had tomato disease problems for years I decided to grow...

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Warning: This Blog is Based in a Mediterranean Climate

...that most of the readers of this blog are either taking some time off from gardening or gardening under a hoop house. But for us here in Southern California it’s the prime agricultural season, when rain falls and the hills are green. It’s my favorite time of year. But I imagine most of you are puzzled by discussions of picking veggies in the middle of January. As puzzled as I would be about topics like bursting pipes and hoop houses. It’s my hope...

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More on our gardening disasters

...afety and compromise. And none of those things say “fun.” I think the best gardening comes about through curiosity and joy. We should all be like little kids in the garden, excited to plant those seeds, out there every day to see how much they’ve grown. I remember one the first vegetables I ever planted in our garden was cabbage. I don’t know why I planted cabbage. Now I’d recommend that newbie gardeners in this climate plant start with something...

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How to Search for Science-Based Gardening Advice

...of writing our books and this blog we’ve had to deal with a lot of thorny gardening questions such as the effectiveness of double digging, the toxicity of persimmons, compost tea, lasagna gardening and how to mulch to name just a few. While the internet is an amazing tool, the number of conflicting commercial interests, biases and crazy talk in the eGardening world can make it difficult to, as Mark Twain put it, “corral the truth.” And I have to...

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