This week's trivia question:  Name the hybridizer of the Double Delight rose.  Provide both first and last names.

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.

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.

Want something unusual for your garden and table?

Try a pluot! A pluot is a hybrid fruit, developed by Zaiger's Genetics. The pluot was developed by first crossing a plum and an apricot, making a fruit that Zaiger calls a "plumcot," and then further crossing the plumcot with plums again. Additional crosses were also made to create different varieties, selecting for sugar content and other desirables.

Pluots have become popular enough that you can now find them in many grocery stores in the area but they are still unknown to many people.

They are smooth-skinned, like a plum, but with a sweeter and stronger flavor. Different varieties have different percentages of plum and apricot, but all have more plum than apricot. The various varieties ripen between June and early October, have different 'chilling' needs, and different skin/flesh colors. We carry the ones best suited to our area.

So, if you would like to try something different, and delicious, in your garden, try a pluot!