A trowel is the tool you use more than any other in the garden and think about least. Nobody brags about a trowel. It just does the job, every day, and it's the one you go looking for when it isn't where you left it. That's what I want from a garden page.

I spent twenty-eight years at the county assessor's office, putting a fair number on things for a living. Since 1991 I've volunteered as a Master Gardener with the Extension office here in Jackson County, and two mornings a week I work the plant clinic, answering the phone and looking at whatever people bring in a paper sack. Lately what they bring in is a printout from the Web. Plant your tomatoes in March. Prune your lilacs in the fall. Put an inch of gravel in the bottom of the pot for drainage.

All three of those will hurt you. Tomatoes want warm soil and no frost; in most of the country, March is weeks too soon. Lilacs set next spring's flower buds over the summer, so a fall pruning cuts off next year's bloom; prune them right after they flower. And gravel in the bottom of a pot doesn't drain anything. Water won't move out of the fine soil into the coarse gravel until the soil above it is soaked, so all the gravel does is raise the soggy layer closer to the roots.

There is a lot of good garden writing on the Web, too, and a good deal of it is on GeoCities.us, written by people who have had their hands in the dirt for forty years. So in April I started giving one of those pages a little recognition each month. That's the Golden Trowel.

The assessor in me wanted a scorecard, so there is one. A hundred points, and I fill out a card for every page I'm sent.

The page with the best card of the month gets the Trowel, announced on the last Saturday. A page doesn't have to be fancy, and it doesn't have to be big. One of the six winners so far is mostly pictures and a ledger, and it was the best thing I read in September.

Send me an e-mail at [email protected] with:

• the address of your garden page,
• your zone, or where you garden,
• one sentence on what your page teaches.

You may nominate your own page, or somebody else's. I read every page I'm sent, all the way to the bottom. There is no fee, and you don't have to put up my link or anybody's banner to be considered. If a page doesn't win, I'll write back and tell you why if you ask. I won't always have time to write if you don't.

If your page wins, you're welcome to put the plaque on it. It's a little table with the trowel from the GeoCities.us clip art, so there's no picture for you to save or upload. Copy this into your page and change the month to yours:

The trowel links back here, so your readers can find the other winners. Whether you put it up at all is your business. The award is the work you did, not the table.

I garden a little under a quarter acre on the east side of Medford, in the Rogue Valley. Out here we go by the Sunset zones more than the USDA ones, and the valley is Sunset zone 7: hot, dry summers, cold winter nights, and a frost that can turn up in May just when you've given up on it. I grow tomatoes, old roses and too many bearded irises, and I've been fighting the same patch of quackgrass along the back fence since 1971. I don't have a garden page of my own. Between the clinic and the Trowel, I read other people's.