The Real Dirt

How about bringing a new plant home to cheer up these dark winter days?  For the avid gardener, houseplants can be an excellent source of greenery and even flowers when the outside garden has gone gray and dormant in the doldrums of mid-winter.  The Moth Orchid, ZZ Plant, Christmas Cactus, Snake Plant,…

The plant that graced the botanical gardens of the Aztec empire over 600 years ago, and the flower of Holy Night legends, is the poinsettia (poin seh tee uh), or flor de nochebuena in Spanish. Seen everywhere for sale during a short six weeks of the year, this plant has come to symbolize Christmas. A closer…

If you have peach or nectarine trees, winter is the time to spray them to prevent peach leaf curl. Peach leaf curl is a fungal disease that attacks peaches and nectarines. It appears in spring, causing new leaves to become reddish, puckered and severely distorted. This disease is caused by the fungus…

For many of us in the North State, Autumn is our favorite time of year. The heat of summer is past, and deciduous trees put on a spectacular show of deep reds, yellows, and oranges. The intensity of this show, however, is not consistently the same each year. What makes the colors of autumn leaves vary in…

It’s a New Season! Gone are the hot dry days of summer. An October rainfall has energized everything that is growing in the Demonstration Garden. The plants seem to be offering up a sigh of relief, just as we humans do when the summer heat is past. And the moistened soil now makes digging easier for all…