Gardening with Mrs. P

Wow! Just smell the morning air, perfumed with blooming citrus and late spring flowers. There are also the evening scents from barbeques as the weather warms up. We love to barbeque in Bakersfield!

A spring garden party can easily be spoiled by some annoying, if not too deadly, transgressions. And Mrs. P is quite familiar with some of them...

The Holidays are busy enough, but then come the resolutions, to-do lists, projects, and promises to make. Mrs. P is going to take you off the hook for a few moments and share 10 really simple garden things that worked for her in 2012.

Have you felt it yet; those first shivers of fall weather in the air? I have. While I'm not quite ready to unpack the winter woollies from mothballs, my garden seems to notice the almost mysterious changing of the season...

More than any time of the year, I think August and September are my favorite months. Why, you may ask, are you nuts?

Garden trends come and go, especially in our central valley, where we haven’t yet settled on an iconic style (Spanish or Asian or English Cottage) and perhaps never will. With our enviable climate and diverse community, Bakersfield gardeners have been exposed to influences from around the world.

They look good, smell good, feel good, and taste good. As with the growth of edible gardening, the popularity of herbs is multi-pronged. An interest in cooking, fed by Food Network TV and the farm-to-table movement, has helped to drive the market’s growth...

Classic beauty: the incredible, edible nasturtium

Everyone should have friends who live someplace like Minnesota or, even better, the Dakotas. Talking to my friend in Minnesota puts the season called winter into perspective...

Separating the holidays of Columbus Day (October 12) and Veteran’s Day (November 11) is Will Rogers' (one of my heroes) birthday on November 4. He once said it was fortunate for Columbus’s subsequent fame to have landed on the Atlantic side of America instead of the Pacific side. If he had landed in California, he never would've gone back home, even to tell the Queen of Spain. Yup, Christopher C. would have happily stayed in our Golden State and nobody would have ever known about him. In any event, Autumn is here and the above holidays are good benchmarks for planting.