Friday, March 25, 2011

Winter Wonderland

Hi everyone,

Winter will not go away and let us get out and garden. This is the most frustrating time of the year for me because I'm soooooo ready for spring and warmth and gardening but the weather refuses to let me do that. There are things that can be planted now but the ground is too wet to work. If we could get a dry spell long enough to dry the ground out enough to till we could plant our cool season crops like peas, spinich, onions, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce and potatoes. You can also start your tomatoes and peppers indoors right now so they will be ready to transplant outside in May. So, at least there are some gardening activities that can be done in this crappy weather while we wait for spring.

so long for now-

Dr. Bill the Garden Doctor

Monday, February 28, 2011

GETTING STARTED

Hi there,

Gardening is a hobby that I am very passionate about. I have been gardening all of my life in various parts of the country. I started as a kid growing up on a small family farm in Ohio. We had a huge garden every year that produced enough fruits and vegetables for our family to live on for the entire year. When I was 16 my family moved to the San Diego area. This time we had a small track home in a sub division with very little room to garden but we still managed to put a few citrus trees in and a small garden on the side of our house.

After I married my beautiful wife and started raising a family I decided to go to college and study landscaping/horticulture. This opened up a whole new world of opportunity in the landscape/nursery industry and gave me the intellectual background I needed to take gardening to the next level. After graduating from Utah State University with a BS Degree in Plant Science/Ornamental Horticulture we moved to the Pacific Northwest to work in the wholesale/grower side of the nursery industry. We spent the next 15 years in the Portland/Vancouver area and I had to learn how to garden in the wet, rainy, moderate climate of the Pacific Northwest.

After 15 years I decided to shake off the moss and come back to Utah to dry out. We have been here for three years now and I'm learning how to garden in the hot/cold, arid, windy climate of Utah. We face a lot of challenges here in the intermountain-high deserts of Utah when it comes to gardening. Our soils are crappy-for the most part-unless you are blessed to live in Sandy or parts of Layton/Kaysville and our growing season is short and the summers are hot, windy and dry. We have little or no organic matter in our soils and lots of clay. Water is a precious and sometimes scarce resource that must be managed and used wisely. All of these things combine to make gardening in Utah a challenge.

The reason I'm putting this blog together is to share my gardening experiences with you as I take on the challenge of gardening in Utah in the hopes that something I say or do will be beneficial to you in your quest to conquer the challenges that gardening in Utah will present. I hope to make this interactive so that you can ask me questions and I can answer them in this blog but I must admit that this whole blog thing is very new to me and I'm not real computer savvy so I will be leaning on my kids for help and we'll see how it turns out.

That's all for now-

Dr Bill the Garden Doctor