If there is any room available in your vegetable garden, fill it with winter vegetables. Use either transplants of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, lettuce, parsley, peas, and Swiss chard or seeds of beets, carrots, lettuce, peas, radishes, and turnips.

Artichokes, asparagus, and horseradish can be bought bare root. Horseradish grows like a weed in Southern California. It's well worth growing, but needs ample water plus plenty of room to grow. Confine it in a special place, such as a raised bed, or it can become quite invasive.

This is the best time of the year for lettuce. It's easy to grow and a money saver. Plant either from transplants, which will give you faster harvest, or from seeds, which will give you more lettuce over a longer period of time. Lettuce seeds germinate within a wide range of soil temperatures, but sprout more quickly at cooler temperatures than warm ones, so this is a good time to plant.

Growing from seeds also gives you more interesting varieties to choose from, such as Rouge d'Hiver, a red Romaine, or "mesclun," the French-termed mix of red and green lettuces with herbs - especially pleasing to the gourmet.

Soil Building Compost is a premium, all-purpose planting and garden soil amendment which contains all-organic, long-lasting ingredients, including chicken manure, bat guano and kelp meal.

The nutrient-rich ingredients improve aeration and drainage, help break up clay soils, increase moisture retention in soils and promote healthy root growth.

Gardner & Bloome® Soil Building Compost is excellent for seed top-dressing, bare-root planting and mulching.

Roses must be pruned every year to maintain vigorous growth and to keep them flowering well. The best time to prune is while they are dormant.

Steps in pruning your roses:

• Think about each cut before you make it. All cuts should be at an angle and just above a bud that is facing away from the center of the bush.
• Remove dead branches and canes.
• Remove old canes that produce only twiggy growth. If your bush is old and has only these old canes, save three or four and cut those back to 3 feet.
• The height to cut your canes back depends on the type of flowers you want. If you want the long stems for cutting, cut your canes back to 3 feet. If you want profuse flowers, but you're not concerned about stem length, cut the canes back one third.
• Remove all branches that are thinner than a pencil.
• Pull off all remaining leaves, rake up all debris, and put it in the trash. Do not use this for your compost pile, as there may be overwintering insects and/or diseases.
• Spray the pruned bush with dormant oil spray.