Robert Kourik's Garden Roots

Fasciation is when a plant's stem widens out to be abnormally wide instead of round. Here is a small example. The photo on the right i...

It's garlic harvest time around here. (60 miles North of San Fransisco.) Here's the Garlic Guru with a fist full of garlic. Until he...

What can I say? “BUY FROM THE SOURCE TO HELP KEEP WRITERS WRITING” Let me know what you think. Visit my web site to learn about my new book ...

Getting ready for fall planting trees? Near a deck, patio or pathway? Here are some general guidelines to allow for adequate space root grow...

The photo on the left shows in-line drip irrigation tubing placed over the landscape as recommend in my book Drip Irrigation, for Every Land...

A view of my little garden. I let the foxglove "walk around". A different pleasure each year. This section was drip irrigated for ...

I came out one morning to see dozens of spider orbs gracing the former summers lavender stalks. An angelic beauty I had only seen this once...

These grape roots reveal a lot about root growth in naturally shallow soils. The roots here are all in the top two feet of the soil. Roots f...

Summer and many gardeners are planting trees. But what to do with wobbly trees after they are cut from the stake in the pot or B&B? If i...

I've been seeing more and more use of in line emitter tubing in commercial settings. Here's a sample from Kaiser's (my HMO) park...

I first stumbled on the disgusting hack job someone did on the tree on the left. Little did I know at would serve such a glorious purpose as...

The drawing in the middle is from my book Drip Irrigation – For Every Landscapes & All Climates , it shows an ideal view of how the wet ...

One of the big trends in gardening these days is planting a multilayered garden with edible plants as ground cover, shrubs, & fruit tree...

One of the big trends in gardening these days is planting a multilayered garden with edible plants as ground cover, shrubs, & fruit tree...

Long before the Berlin wall came down, the arbitrary horticultural barriers between the vegetable garden and the flower border, between frui...

My garden is full of dozens of foxglove that have seed themselves, leading to a wide range of colors-from creamy white to pink, rosy pink, a...

More fooder for the discussion about mustard plants growing in vineyards. In college, Knoll, who has a Ph. D. in Chemistry, researched the s...

Numero uno is one of the often poorly-understood concepts about drip irrigation. There are many scientific studies which indicate that drip ...

Lawns, yawns. They aren’t needed as much as they are found. However, there's no better place to have young kids run around and, play bad...

It' time for tuning up & testing drip systems. If, gawd forbid, you have a a system with lots of punched-in emitters you'll need...

It’s spring in full-tilt boogie. Where there are gophers, the trend has been to plant in wire baskets. In the past ½-inch aviary wire was us...

An eccentric tree no doubt. I got carried away while pruning. (Actually, this is being cultivated by a person I haven’t met yet.) I like to ...

Spring time and baskets are rollin’…into the ground. Gophers in the west (certainly around my home) have sprung from the womb and are seekin...

The Scotch broom pictured here is beautiful while blooming. But this exotic invasive is like standing gasoline during the summer & fall....

The Ceanothus shrubs & trees ( Ceanothus spp.) are just past their peak. But they have offered a glorious view. In the forest it is esp...

Every late winter through early spring Napa Valley, CA celebrates the glorious mustard growing between the dormant rows of grape vines. Many...

This is actually a close-up photograph of a special strangling vine. However, you can find similar unions between two or more roots in a wa...

The CA poppies are in full bloom. I found this rare petal formation.(Ordinary on left. "rare" on the right.)

Tree roots grow one and one-half to two and even three times the width of the foliage above. More amazingly, this ratio is maintained throug...

A futile attempt at pruning an ornamental ‘Bradford Pear’ tree to keep it from blocking the names of the business. (The photograph on the ri...