garden-help

If you garden, you're going to deal with insects, disease, weeds and pests. There's so much information available on-line it can be hard to know where to start. Some of the best starting points include:

• University of California pest notes pests in homes, gardens, landscapes, and turf
• Animal Pests: from birds to voles, we've got information and advice for many of the most common troublesome critters
• Weed Management in Landscapes (and a photo gallery of some of the most common weeds)
• Orchard Pests and Diseases -a discussion of integrated pest management from The California Backyard Orchard

There's more too, just look for the links to the left.

Elaine Levine

You can't see it. It's hard to pronounce, but mycorrhizal fungi are important to home gardeners because they affect most of the plants we grow.

In short, mycorrhizae provide plants with nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus, and plants in turn give mycorrhizae the sugars produced through photosynthesis. "Basically, 90 percent of the world's vascular plants belong to families that have symbiotic associations with mycorrhizal fungi," says Michael Miller, senior soil scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois.

Inoculations of commercially produced mycorrhizal fungi for food crops are on the rise, but there is controversy about its use by the home gardener. So far, say the researchers in the field, if you already have healthy soil, you probably don't need inoculants.

Besides farmers, the most likely beneficiaries of inoculants are people who live in new developments where the topsoil was removed.

To encourage your own mycorrhizae: