The Real Dirt

A virus can reduce a plant's growth, lower its yield, and result in inferior fruit, vegetables and flowers. Viruses are often very host specific. Recognizing symptoms can help you take appropriate action, where possible, to manage a virus and hopefully prevent its spread.

Most gardeners are aware of plant diseases that can wreak havoc in their gardens. If you grow fruit trees, you may be confronted with curled, reddened peach leaves (peach leaf curl fungus).

Record numbers of people are gardening this spring and victory gardens are rapidly sprouting across the nation. Now is a better time than ever to learn how to save seeds. People have saved plant seeds for millennia.

You say you don't have a green thumb, or you don't have a yard for gardening? No problem! You can easily grow fresh, nutritious microgreens all year long in a sunny window in your home. All you need is soil, seeds, a container, and water.

In the wild areas on our planet, trees, bushes, and grasses grow on ground that has continual additions of new layers of dead and dying plant matter. Leaves fall from trees and shrubs, grasses dry in the summer: these materials cover the soil and gradually decompose.