gardening

Fern Marshall Bradley has been preaching the organic gospel for decades.
A lifelong gardener and a University of California, Davis, alumna, she tends her own vegetables, fruit and flowers without resorting to chemical pesticides. She went "green" long before the word meant more than the color of her thumb.

Do the leaves of your roses turn whitish and puckered? Perhaps your beautiful buds or even the flowers succumb to alien powder? These are symptoms of one of the most vexing diseases of roses, which is in fact a fungus. Known as powdery mildew, it has bedeviled rose growers since the earliest times.

Gardening in raised beds offer a simple and effective way to create a healthy and productive garden by manipulating the growing environment. There are several advantages, including the ability to create ideal conditions for soil structure and drainage, two essential keys to success.
Fine-tuning soil for structure and drainage:

I have three rules to guarantee the success of almost any garden or landscape.
First, put the right plant in the right place (plant tags offer important information about this). Next, feed the soil with natural amendments and let the soil feed the plants. And, finally, use mulch.

Growing up with parents who lived through the Great Depression instilled in me a sense of cheapness.
There's a thrill to getting a bargain or, better yet, something for free. Gardening doesn't have to be expensive; there are lots of ways to have a beautiful garden without draining the savings account.

These past few weeks I've been doing something that has been an all-too-infrequent activity for me -- gardening, and lots of it! Well, that is, if you count scooping and spreading several loads of compost and mulch into my truck bed and, subsequently, into my new garden plot.

I miss the old roses terribly.

A few months ago, I embarked on a new speaking campaign.

Officially, Earth Day 2009 has come and gone. But it's something I observe 365 days a year.
Although we have not been very good stewards of the resources Mother Nature has bestowed upon us, I believe many of us are working harder than ever to correct the errors of our ways.

"Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there." -- Thomas Fuller

Gardens can come in many shapes and sizes. They can be contained or sprawling, big or small.