Napa

Get ready for a day of viewing beautiful new gardens, hands-on learning and fun-filled activities for the entire family, plus expert gardening advice.

I love salads. A salad with my dinner is almost as essential as a glass of wine. When most of us think of a green salad we think of lettuce. Lettuce has been cultivated for thousands of years. The word lettuce comes from the Latin for milk, due to the milky liquid it produces when a leaf is broken.

Every gardener has the ability to have a positive and significant influence on earth's warming climate. Improving soil by adding organic material like compost helps the life in earth's over-tilled and compacted soil. Try thinking of the soil in your garden as a living body.

Last January I decided to pull out the thicket of wild blackberries that took up 25 percent of the backyard.

Six weeks ago, I dug up my undies. Earlier this year, I decided to repeat an experiment that the new class of Napa County Master Gardeners had conducted last winter: I buried my underpants. Why do such a thing? The results will tell you how active the residents of your soil are.

Can we improve our soil and manage insect pests with techniques that slow and maybe even ultimately reverse the human damage to natural resources? Practices that started innocently enough to improve and simplify food production have turned into a huge problem.

Heal the earth by healing the soil? Are we really able to slow global warming by manipulating dirt? Humans have been stripping mother earth of her verdant, life-supporting cloak for a long time, but the damage has shot up to a critical stage in recent years.

The first time I saw soldier fly larvae in my worm bin I did not know what they were other than maggots. I picked them out with a long tweezer and dropped them on the ground. My intention was to kill them when I was done.

Cucumbers are an easy summer vegetable to grow in Napa County gardens. I'm sure of that, because last summer I participated in the Napa County Master Gardeners' field test of three different varieties, and we had more cucumbers than we could eat for a couple of months.

Here's a word to add to your garden vocabulary: Euphorbia. This is not to be confused with euphoria. How did a plant family get such a curious botanical name? The family is named for Euphorbos, a Greek physician who lived more than two thousand years ago.