Planting time is here! After a long wet winter, there’s never been a better time to get your garden growing. Planning a garden can be a daunting task if growing your own is new to you. As any determined grower will tell you, homegrown tastes the best and Topanga is an excellent place to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, berries, fruit trees…and cannabis. With proper planning, you’ll be enjoying the fruits of your labors for years to come. Cannabis is an excellent “teacher plant� and may help you learn to grow some of the best fruits and veggies around. Since it grows like a weed and puts nutrients back into the soil, planting a few cannabis seeds into the ground may help spark your plants and thus your interest in a lifelong hobby of growing plants. Choosing what to plant in your garden is an important step to ensure its success. Although planting seeds is nature’s preferred way to start a garden, getting young plants from a nursery may help with the task. Most popular fruit tree varieties are the result of grafting a choice cutting onto a vigorous rootstock to produce high-yielding trees with delicious fruit. Similarly, cannabis clones are genetic copies of a mother-plant and the most popular for commercial growers. Selectively bred hybrid varieties create a predictable result by combining a variety of favorable traits from several different parent plants. Heirloom plants grown from seeds of a recognized stabilized genetic variant are also popular for home gardeners. Cannabis growers have developed some of the most sophisticated growing techniques used today. A healthy root system or rhizome is incredibly important for growth of a healthy plant. Indoor hydroponic systems, which bathe the roots in a nutrient-enriched solution, can facilitate rapid growth by creating an aerated, moisture-rich zone for roots to thrive. A sunny space with rich soil full of organic matter and microbes can be even better. Covering your garden with a thick layer of mulch can help retain moisture to protect the roots and provides a great source of food for a healthy community of beneficial microbes to grow. Unlike hydroponics that use chemical-based fertilizers, organic soil systems take time to develop, so gardeners will see improvements to their growth year after year. Young plants need access to water at the base of their stem, but as their root system expands, they can bring moisture in from farther away.