Station Archive

'Tis a time of CHANGE!  Weather is cooler, season is later ... For some folks, it's time to cut down the cucumber vines and plant some brassicas. For others (like Don), there are still tomatoes ripening to harvest into October. What's your plan for a winter garden? Now is a good time to plant peas, lettuce, brassicas, and other cool seaon vegetablees.  You can also plan to put "cover crops" on the portion of your summer garden that you don't plan to plant for the winter -- to keep down weeds and improve your soil.

Don's Davis Enterprise article "Of Cabbages and Kings" explains why we can have such a wide diversity of vegetables from JUST ONE SPECIES! -- Brassica oleracea. Here is its little-known history ...  "Strolling along the windswept limestone cliffs of southern and western Europe, in places where salt spray limited the growth of other plants and temperatures were usually mild but cool, one of our forebears evidently noticed that the leaves of a common plant were edible. Bitter, a little skunky smelling, fibrous, but edible. ...  "