I planted some midsummer flowers in my San Francisco front garden on Monday. In the 15 square feet of the garden where I was planting, I found 27 small pieces of plastic, from an insect sauce cup lid clearly marked as recyclable to a tiny bit of a white electrical cable. I am not in a particularly intensely occupied part of the city, either. We are drowning the earth in plastic. It started out as a boon to humankind, but now it is polluting our oceans and land. The micro plastic bis enter our food chain and poison us. Please find out what you can do to become a part of the solution rather than ..read more

  The cat is out of the bag because the announcement is now on booksellers' websites. B&N and Amazon have even posted the entire new Introduction to Golden Gate Gardening 4th (30th Anniversary) Edition. It will be released on August 1, this summer. The book has been updated throughout, with current information on  plant varieties, seed and plant sources, resources, for gardeners, and suggested additional reading, There are also changes throughout to the latest information on gardening techniques, pest management, etc. The book has been updated to explain where we stand currently ..read more

March 21, 2023 New York Times, Science Times, D5 announced the discovery of compounds made by bacteria that kill pathogenic fungi in both plants and animals by riddling them with holes. It has proven effective against Botrytis cinera, or gray mold, and against Candida albicans, a fungus that cam infect the human body.             The Times story was about the naming of the new compounds keanumycins, after an actor who has held “many iconic roles in which he is extremely efficient in ‘inactivating’ his enemies, Keanu Reeves. (Mr. Reeves say ..read more

Recently we attended a Dickens Dinner Party, sponsored by the Bay Area Culinary Historians (BACH). We were asked to make a dish for the dinner from a recipe that was in a cookbook of the era. I chose to make an apple tart, using apples from our tree. The following photos are from the making of my "test tart," the one I made in November, just to see how it would turn out. To see photos from the actual dinner, see the Facebook page of BACH, though for some reason they didn't catch an image of the two tarts I brought to the dinner.  A tart is like a pie, but the crust often contains a little ..read more

In my dry-summer  San Francisco garden, the spring bloom is wonderful, but not as much blooms in summer. So in July and August, when spring's show has faded, I welcome the dramatically large and vivid blossoms of Tigridia pavonia. I like the color they add to my summer garden and the fact that the dramatic flowers face upward, so I see the fronts of the flowers when I look down from an upstairs window or even when I am standing over the flower bed. Each flower lasts only a single day, but each plant has several flowers, so the show goes on for weeks. Tigridias grow from small bulbs, which ..read more

Watsonias--Wildly Successful Plant of Late Spring May 22, 2012   And again in January 2021 I ran the following post, as you can see from the date above, in 2012. It has attracted many comments. I am running it again, below, in order to write about a couple of issues raised by a number of commenters. First, read the post, below, which explains Watsonia culture and shows some photos of the plants blooming in our neighborhood. However, readers cannot find the bulbs for sale. The most likely reason for this is that Watsonias are out of fashion. When gladiolus bulbs began to be actively hybrid ..read more

When you grow food, you have made food exist in the world. The earth did not previously include that food. From here several things can happen to the food you created. It can show up in some delightful meal you serve yourself and maybe others; it can be donated to someone else who will want to eat it more than you do, or it can sit in your garden until it is no longer delicious but instead is tough and seedy or even rotten. When I have grown some food, I see it as my responsibility to aim for one of the first two destinations for it, and avoid the third as much as possible.     ..read more

A new website shepherd.com asks authors to create lists of "five best books." I created two lists. One is a list for "The Five Best Books for Gaining Garden Know-how." Here is a link to it: https://shepherd.com/best-books/gaining-garden-know-how The second list is to "The Five Best Books for Understanding California's Mediterranean Climate. Here is a link to that one: https://shepherd.com/best-books/california-mediterranean-gardening Of course my own books, Golden Gate Gardening and Wildly Successful Plants: Northern California are good ways to learn both topics, but, though Golden Gate Garden ..read more

In the United States, the crisp, sweet, crunch of yacon roots is a secret known mainly to gardeners. When I began to grow it, late in the last century, it was even less known, though it has been a popular food in its native South America for centuries. Yacon Leaves.             Credit: Pam Peirce After I read about this plant in the book Lost Crops of the Incas, it took me three years to locate starts to grow. The low point was the first trip I took to a tropical plant nursery near my parents’ house in San Diego County. I had spoken to the proprietor on the phone ..read more

Recently, as I browsed online seed catalogs, I noticed more varieties than usual listed as “Out of Stock.” In addition, some seed companies are warning that delivery may take longer than usual. Some are even shutting down periodically while they catch up on orders. I’ve wondered: “What’s going on? Is there a seed shortage?” At a National Gardening Bureau-sponsored panel presentation in March, I learned from seed suppliers what challenges they are facing and also their advice for gardeners. Diane Blazek, Executive Director of the Bureau says that last spring, seed retailers were selling to 100 ..read more