If you embrace organic living, but you're a newbie in the organic gardening department, J. Howard Garrett should become your new best friend.

A "Dallas Morning News" columnist and veteran landscape architect who has created organic landscaping programs for companies like Frito-Lay and Johnson & Johnson, Garrett is also the author of The Dirt Doctor's Guide to Organic Gardening: Essays on the Natural Way -- one of the best primers you'll ever find on the subject.

If you're like most of us who follow an organic lifestyle, your home is probably filled with a variety of houseplants that decorate each room and help cleanse the air you breathe.

But how do you prevent pests from attacking your favorite ferns and palms?

Here are five fool proof organic gardening solutions.

A more perfect world would allow everyone to have the time, energy and resources to produce organic food via their own efforts through organic gardening. Naturally this is not always possible.. Yet the costs at the market of purchasing natural and organic foods invariably leads consumers to consider how they can minimize the expense of the food without mitigating the quality.

While the idea of producing all of our own organic foods is alluring, in most cases it is simply not realistic. Even fully functional organic farms seldom have the produce that would provide a well rounded and nutritional diet all of the time. The alternative to personally producing all or nothing is to gauge personal preferences with personal resources.

Now that the warmer weather is upon us, that can mean only one thing to gardeners - it's gardening time! May is planting time and June and July are when we maintain our new seedlings which grow into healthy adult plants.

One of the tastiest benefits of organic gardening is the ability to maintain a well-stocked kitchen pantry, bursting with seasonal herbs that add zest to your home-cooked meals.

Now that summer has arrived, you have a wide range of organic gardening choices: basil, Italian parsley, oregano, marjoram, thyme, chives, chocolate mint, lemon balm, lemon verbena, lavender, pineapple sage and lemongrass, among many others.