Philadelphia Gardeners' Information Resources

January is the time for seed catalogs coming through your mail box and for planning the coming summer’s campaign in the garden.

To expand your knowledge and keep up to date with the latest thinking and practices in horticulture, take advantage of the fantastic range of free resources available from Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences, and similar resources from nearby state universities.

Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences has a big publication program — many publications are free, others are for sale (inexpensively) and many can be downloaded as PDFs. Go to http://pubs.cas.psu.edu/Publications.asp to search for publications and to browse lists.

The Vegetable & Small Fruit Gazette is Penn State's monthly newsletter for commercial vegetable and small fruit growers. Although it is directed at commercial operations it has lots of information useful to gardeners. Send a blank email to gazette-L-subscribe-request@lists.psu.edu to subscribe.

If you have never done it, plan to do a soil test of your yard this spring. Go to http://extension.psu.edu/philadelphia/programs/master-gardener/horticulture-hot-line for information. While you are there, download a copy of the valuable Philadelphia Planting Guide, which has a detailed calendar of planting and seeding times especially tailored to Philadelphia’s climate.

Our neighboring states also have excellent information programs. The News Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station lists its publications at http://njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs/. University of Delaware Cooperative Extension Fact Sheets and Publications are available at http://extension.udel.edu/factsheet/.