Very important is to get a planting calendar that's suitable to your area. You should be able to find them by going to Google and searching "Vegetable planting calendar for [insert your town or county]". They will tell you when to plant, when your last frost date is, things like that. Typically, summer vegetables are planted after the last frost date (you can search that term also to get the date). Cucumbers, zucchini and beans should really be started in ground outdoors. You don't gain much by starting early indoors (I only start tomatoes and peppers inside before the start of the season). They don't like to be transplanted, and they are such fast-growing plants, you don't gain time by starting early inside. How often to water new seeds? Planted in ground outdoors I check them daily. Give them a good soaking (assuming you have good draining soil). Go out the next morning. If the top of your soil looks dry, you'll want to water. If your soil looks dark and moist, let them go and check again the next day. I check my new seedlings daily, watering when the top of the soil starts looking light and dry. Once the plants have come up and start sprouting true leaves (the leaves you get after the first two), you can start backing off on watering. At that time, you'll want to start poking your finger in the soil an inch or so down to see if the plants need watering. Hope that helps!

We have bees year-round so I imagine you will too. They really are starved for something to eat in the winter and spend the whole day foraging. I try to keep some sort of cool-season flower, cover crop or weed blooming for them. Sometimes I use hummingbird feeders without bee guards as bee feeders in winter. I've noticed for well over a decade now that when I put out cracked corn for the mourning doves, the bees feed on it, though I am not sure how they do it. That's especially true in the dead of winter, but also in every other part of the year as well. Buckwheat is wonderful and clover attracts many bees and other pollinators as well. Clover also is a cool-season crop, but I have little bits of clover here and there in shady areas that survives almost year round. Sometimes it dies back in mid-summer. Some of it was blooming last week behind the barn but I haven't looked at it lately because all I've done for far too long is harvest, can, harvest, can, harvest and can. It is amazing how much changes in the garden if you are only stepping foot in it a couple of times a week to harvest. I had a volunteer plant pop up in the back garden about a month ago. It is an Armenian cucumber. The cool thing is that it popped up in the middle of a hill of summer squash plants and it is growing over them, through them and around them. Their foliage is mixed it with the cuke foliage, and these plants are producing a nice harvest. I also haven't seen a squash bug or SVB near them. (Now that I said that, I'll go out tomorrow and discover SVBs have killed them all because that is how gardening works.) Say "I haven't seen a cucumber beetle all year...." and a million show up the next day. It will be interesting to see if the squash pests avoid the squash plants growing with the Armenian cuke (which, you may remember, is a melon and not a cucumber). I've often wondered if I could hide other summer squash and winter squash plants by planting them in the middle of Seminole plants. I haven't really tried it because the Seminole is such a rampant grower that I think it likely would smother any other nearby plants. Bon, Fred often complains to me that he doesn't have bees and I just don't get it because he is less than a mile from us. I know he does have them when the fruit trees are blooming. My garden is so filled with bees and wasps that some of my friends don't want to step foot it in. I work out there in it all the time and haven't been stung by a bee or wasp in the garden in years. Of course, if I was allergic to them, their presence would be a problem. And, of course, often people who don't have plentiful bees and pollinators have brought it on themselves by spraying broad-spectrum insecticides, which is something I avoid doing specifically for the sake of the bees and other beneficials. I planted my cukes late, trying to ensure I wouldn't have to start canning pickles while trying to finish up the canning of all the tomatoes. I checked the cucumber plants this morning and think it is going to work out as planned. The tomato crop is really winding down and I'm through canning salsa, and the cucumbers are in bloom. That is, of course, assuming disease or pests don't suddenly hit the cukes. In a garden, anything can happen. Dawn

All compost is organic. Anyone that sells you "organic compost" may be selling you a "pig in poke". The term "garden soil" is the same, meaningless since that can be anything the seller wants it to be. Pictures may be of some help as can a visit to your counties office of the University of California Cooperative Extension Service where they would want you to bring in samples of what you see.

Sorry but it isn't just semantics and it is often very confusing to gardeners if the terms are used interchangeably. Many discussions here to support that claim of confusion. So the vital differences between hay and straw in the world of mulching, soil improvement, and composting need to be understood and the labels used correctly whenever possible to avoid contributing to that confusion. Straw is a waste/byproduct. It is the dry, hollow stemmed,residue of grain crops (wheat, oats, barley, etc.) that is mowed and baled after the grain is harvested and so contains only minimal seed. It does not regrow after mowing and has no forage value. It has a high insulating factor even when used in shallow layers, is very slow to decompose, and is moderately water repellent. It is an almost pure carbon and has little to no nitrogen content. Hay is not a byproduct. It is an almost pure green, high nitrogen/low carbon, flat stemmed, mowed and baled grass (rye, orchard, alfalfa, buffalo, etc.) that is grown expressly for animal forage. It always regrows after mowing and its seed content can be quite high depending on when in the life cycle it is mowed. It has little insulating value even when used in thick layers, decomposes rapidly, and can harm plants if in direct contact as it decomposes, and has little to no water repelling characteristics (it mats). While both may work, when used properly, to suppress weeds in the garden their moisture retention, decomposition, insulation from heat, and soil improvement characteristics are very different. Hope this clarifies for future readers. Dave