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You might have a place by the front door or a spot within view of your patio or driveway where a beautifully colorful rock garden showpiece would make an inviting visual. Sunny areas or shady spots make no difference as you'll choose your plantings accordingly. Rock gardens are low maintenance, in season all year long, and provide an eye-catching element for your garden. Just keep in mind that a rock garden should end up looking like a natural rocky landscape and be low maintenance. Here's your chance to be creative!

If gardening makes you happy and brings not only delicious food to your table but also satisfaction, you might want to garden year-round. It's entirely possible to garden in Zones 8, 9, and 10 by using a medium weight row cover. A mulch of straw, leaves, or pine needles will also help you discover the joys of winter gardening by keeping the plants warmer and the soil moist. You may plant some short season crops and root vegetables. I would recommend beets, carrots, and onions as your root crops, and cruciferous vegetables like Broccoli, Brussel sprouts, Cauliflower, and Cabbage for their tolerance to cold weather.

August in the garden is a month filled with harvesting the tasty fruits (or veggies) of your labors like tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers. Taking lots of notes on the successes and failures of your 2019 garden to help you plan for next Spring, and finally planting a Fall crop.

Pull out or divide perennial flowers that may be taking over and replant them in bare spots making room for new plantings. You may want to deadhead flowers, encouraging them to rebloom until the first frost. Prepare sunny areas now where you'll be able to plant perennials like fruiting trees, shrubs, and berries for future years of harvest.

With marijuana becoming legal in numerous states, there are now many people who grow their own and have done so successfully. From our experience with irrigation systems and visiting many of these legally licensed grows from setup to harvest, it's the quality of products and the grower's daily attention to detail that makes a big difference. Here are some basics to consider before you choose the best irrigation products.

Without beneficial insects and their ability to aid in plant pollination, 90 percent of all flowering plant species might disappear. Thirty percent of all plants in the world would not exist if it weren’t for pollinators. Your vegetable garden wouldn’t be as productive. We all need to do what we can to provide a beneficial habitat for them on our property. Pollinators are insects and other animals that move pollen from one flower to the next, fertilizing it and allowing it to reproduce via seed. Butterflies, bees, birds, bats, other insects, and even ants are some of the many pollinators that are so important. What can you and I do to help?

The story of modern drip irrigation begins with a man named Simca Blass, an engineer who in 1947 was working on the first modern aqueduct in the Jordan Valley, of Israel. After discovering a large tree that was growing "without water", he dug down to find a leaking pipe coupler that was supplying water to the tree. He bought up the pipes that England had used to extinguish fires during the London Blitz and shipped them home where they were used to construct a water system to supply water to 11 Israeli settlements and the Arab Bedouins in the Negev desert. In the 1950s Blass reopened his engineering office and pursued his idea of commercial drip irrigation.