We had a large newly created yard and I have a love of flowers so I naturally desired a flower garden. The problem was that the fill that was trucked in to create this yard was all chunks of blacktop and concrete with a light sprinkling of top soil to cover the chunks. There was no digging into the dirt without hitting something solid. We couldn't even drive in a tent stake.

In agriculture, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a pest control strategy that uses an array of complementary methods: natural predators and parasites, pest-resistant varieties, cultural practices, biological controls, various physical techniques, and pesticides as a last resort. It is an ecological approach that can significantly reduce or eliminate the use of pesticides.

Pinpointing the absolute beginnings of agriculture is problematic because the transition away from purely hunter-gatherer societies, in some areas, began many thousands of years before the invention of writing. Nonetheless, Archaeobotanists/Paleoethnobotanists have traced the selection and cultivation of specific food plant characteristics, such as a semi-tough rachis and larger seeds, to just after the Younger Dryas (about 9,500 BC) in the early Holocene in the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent.

The oca or oka is the Quechuan word for a perennial plant grown in the central and southern Andes for its starchy edible tuber, used as a root vegetable. Its leaves and young shoots can be eaten as a green vegetable as well. Introduced to Europe in 1830 as a competitor to the potato and to New Zealand as early as 1860, it has become popular in that country under the name New Zealand yam and is now a common table vegetable.

Lilium lancifolium (syn. L. tigrinum) is a species of lily native to eastern Asia, including China, Korea and Japan. It is one of several species of lily to which the common name Tiger lily is applied, and the species most widely so known.