Late Winter Gardening for the Southern California “Homestead”

The Southern Californian winter garden is a delicious one. Cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and kale, carrots, beets, and radishes, onions and leeks, and an astounding array of lettuces can all be pulled from your garden’s soil. The winter is starting to come to a close but there remain plenty of options for the winter gardener. The time for tomatoes, peppers, squash and cucumber is just around the corner. A post on the summer vegetable garden is soon to come. But today’s late-winter gardener should focus on crops that grow quickly (to make room for soon-to-be-planted summer crops) and on planting fruit trees.

Home for a Holiday – A Dispatch from Jonathan Duffy Davis in Muskoka, Ontario, Canada

Jonathan Duffy Davis here. I am home for a bit of a holiday and a visit with my family. Though I grew up in Toronto, Muskoka is where my family and I spend our time when I come back for a visit. Muskoka isn’t exactly the Great White North but it is rural (two deer just ran across the driveway when I began to type this paragraph– scout’s honour) and parts of it are quite untamed. A quick drive lands us in Algonquin Provincial Park, a 3,000 square-mile preserve of wilderness where the hardwood forests of the south yield to the conifers that dominate the near and far north. Muskoka is a place that I love: a place where the canoe is an icon and a true conveyance, where there are more lakes and rivers than a person could visit or know, a place where the air is crisp on August evenings and definitely smells like home.