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Fruit Trees

December 20, 2008 | Emily Green
As unsold holiday junk is cleared from store shelves the day after Christmas, nurseries around Southern California will be filling up with bare-root fruit trees. The thought of apricots, cherries and plums alone could make your mouth water. Put the trees in the ground in January and you will have blossoms by March. Some trees, such as 'Anna' apples, may even fruit the first season.
July 27, 2008 | Alfred de Montesquiou, Associated Press
Abdellilah Meddich's childhood memories of the famous palm grove of Marrakech are of a "magical" place, a lush desert oasis of flowers, animals and farmers who tended tree-shaded plots. No longer. Today, the unique and vast World Heritage site is "nothing like it used to be when I was a child," says Meddich, 37, a forestry engineer overseeing a plan to plant more palms. An ancient city on the rim of the Sahara desert, Marrakech has been a magnet for tourism since the 1960s, when hippies dubbed it "the city of four colors" -- for its blue skies, its backdrop of white snowcapped peaks, the red walls of its medieval fortifications, and the sprawling green palm grove on its outskirts.
July 20, 2008
Foil balloons should be outlawed. ("Filled with worry over bill," July 14.) They are dangerous when allowed to drift into power lines. In the past five years, I have been affected by foil balloons coming into contact with high-voltage lines three times. The first incident was the most frightening. It caused an explosion and severed two 30-foot sections of line carrying 12,500 volts. One sizzling line was dancing in our backyard, and the other in our neighbor's. One of our fruit trees next to the wood fence was on fire.
April 1, 2008 | Mitchell Landsberg, Times Staff Writer
Today a high school, tomorrow an orchard (with a high school attached). That was sort of the idea when students from the Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale got down and dirty helping to plant some 60 fruit trees and shrubs on their small campus near Hawthorne Boulevard. The school, now in its seventh year, has an environmental focus and a college preparatory curriculum.
January 10, 2008 | Ellen Hoffs, Special to The Times
There was a time not long ago when seasoned gardeners awaited January the way kids wait for Christmas. They raced into local nurseries with their wish lists in hand and crowded around moist sand- or soil-filled bins loaded with bare-root fruit trees searching for the variety they wanted. When they spied it, a nursery employee pulled the tree out of the soil so its roots could be examined. If it met with their approval, it was wrapped in newspaper, and gardeners hurried home to plant.
July 29, 2007 | Cecilia Rasmussen, Times Staff Writer
A movie studio, a Roman goddess and a Native American tribe more than 1,000 miles away inspired a few city names in Los Angeles County. Each of the county's 88 cities has its own story. Here's how some of them got their names, along with the year they incorporated. -- Montebello (1920) Harris Newmark, a merchant who later wrote a history of the Southland's progress, joined several partners in purchasing Italian-born Alessandro Repetto's 5,000-acre ranch in the East Los Angeles area in the 1880s.
April 9, 2007 | AL MARTINEZ
THERE'S a joke about a guy who travels the world looking for someone to explain the meaning of life to him. He finally finds a guru in a cave high up in the mountains of Tibet to whom he asks the question. After considerable thought, the guru responds, "Life is a lemon tree." Period. The man is clearly disappointed and not a little angry. "I spend a fortune and give up years of my life to have the question answered by one of the great gurus of our age and you say, 'Life is a lemon tree'?
January 25, 2007 | Robert Smaus
HISTORICALLY, February is our rainiest month so it is not a busy time for gardeners. If there is little or no rain, it will be a very dry year. Though everybody loves a sunny day, gardens cannot get by on irrigation alone. They need deep soaking rains that reach tree roots and flush harmful salts (found in irrigation water) from the soil. If it does rain and you must get into a garden bed, to prune a rose, for example, keep plywood handy to toss onto the wet soil.
January 18, 2007 | Lili Singer, Special to The Times
THE recent blast of record-breaking arctic weather didn't just devastate commercial agricultural crops. It damaged backyard plants too. Geraniums turned to gelato. Aloe leaves disintegrated like spilled Slushees. What can home gardeners do to save an injured plant? And how can they protect against another cold snap, if it comes? In terms of frostbitten flora, the most important task is to exercise patience.
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