Help is Here

Garden Rant, one of the most popular gardening blogs on the Internet, provided a link to some great starter videos.

If you are new to vegetable gardening, especially organic methods, Ed Bruske put a dozen how-to videos on the Monkey See website.

The video topics include: Tools, Soil Testing, Seed Starting, Mulch, Transplants, Watering, Garden Pests and Weeds. Click here to view.

If you are ready and willing to start vermicomposting, here is a link to an entry on TangledFleece that shows exactly what to do through a series of photographs.

Phlox! What a great perennial - scented, dramatic, reliable, insect and disease free. What would my flower beds be without Phlox? GardensOyVey has a nice set of photos and descriptions of 8-cultivars at this link.

In our garden today, all the garlic was pulled and cleaned and hung to dry. More peppers and tomato plants went in.

The thrill for the day was that the black swallowtail butterflies found the fennel we planted for them and the caterpillars are big and fat. It is easy to see those bright green and black striped larva but I have yet to find the chrysalis. This year the fennel is in a raised bed to improve our chances of observing the entire life-cycle.

Believe it or not it is time to start planting seeds of winter vegetables. A Master Gardener newsletter from California provided this link to a chart of germination temperatures for various vegetables. The chart is from the organic gardening organization, Rodale Press.

This link will take you to their Organic Gardening blog.

Happy gardening.