gardening

"Only in America do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage."

Starting seeds is like raising kids: an ultimate act of faith. Give them the right conditions, and they'll do the rest. It's a little easier with seeds, I admit. Provide warmth, moisture, light and a disease-free potting mix to support them, and you'll soon have healthy, garden-ready plants.

They call it a "torture test" when extreme weather descends, as it has this past year in Texas. While many lament such difficulties, one rose grower claims that this anomaly of high temperatures separates the men from the boys in test plots.

We're all familiar with gardens designed around flowers. But a landscape with only flowers can really be lacking. Don't get me wrong. I'm crazy about flowers. But if I had only one small area to plant, I'd use flowers as accents and concentrate on foliage as the major elements of the design.

Tomatoes that ripen all at once on a perfectly sized bush aid in mechanized harvesting, but that's a very short season for fresh picking. Tomatoes that keep a long time in cold storage also please commercial farmers, but we all know what those taste like.

Healthy, well-maintained gardens invite all kinds of wild guests. Some, like uninvited varmints, can do a lot of damage. Even beautiful, welcome birds can sometimes take a toll on fruits and other garden plants if you're not careful. But the humble toad is a garden guest that's always welcome.

I grew up in NASA's Apollo years (1961-72), when space-age technology yielded such essentials as memory foam, smoke detectors and water filters. The agency helped fine-tune other products, such as cordless tools for Black and Decker, to make them better suited to space.

Although they were discovered only about a century ago, African violets (Saintpaulia spp.) today are one of the country's favorite houseplants. Not surprising, they're easy to grow.

New Jersey was devastated by 19th-century iron mining. The land was dredged and drained to create more ground for expanding an iron furnace. The result was an environmental catastrophe that left the swampy land nearly worthless and too poor to support crops.

They say any task is easier when you use the right tool. And that's certainly true for gardening. But with thousands of tools on the market, from cheap and flimsy knockoffs to big-ticket vanity items, it's hard to know which tools are necessary to do the most efficient job. In no particular order, here's a basic tool set with what I consider gardening essentials.

Digging: