Right before I took off on a 10-day road trip through the Eastern Sierra, I started a few seeds in my bay window. There were tomato seeds, eggplant seeds, pepper seeds, squash and cucumbers and beans and endless varieties of leafy greens. I scored a great deal on peat pots from the dollar store, made [...]
spring
Spring is a big and busy time around here: I pull up old plants, rake over beds, amend the soil, sow rows of seeds, and watch over seedlings. For most of March and April, I’m constantly dealing with dirt under my nails and mud stuck to my Bogs. (Hence, you will almost always see me [...]
If there was any fruit that identified most with Southern California, that icon of buttery goodness would be the avocado. And out here, the king of avocados is the Hass. Once an obscure cultivar, it now accounts for 80 percent of the world’s avocado crop and 90 percent of California’s avocado crop, where San Diego [...]
I know it’s not spring yet, but in my neck of the woods (which I affectionately call “the land of 72 and sunny”) it already feels like spring, and it even looks like spring too. I guess that prognosticatin’ groundhog was right after all — spring is near, and this is what I’m seeing around [...]
Looks like summer came early to the garden… Here we are in the middle of April, and I just spotted my first green tomato on the vine!
Last week I had the honor of hosting Jere Gettle (as in the Jere Gettle from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, pictured at right) and Paul Wallace (the man in charge of Baker Creek’s west coast branch, the Petaluma Seed Bank) at my humble little abode. They were only in town for a day or two, [...]
