paso robles

A new gardenerd wrote in recently with a couple of questions.  We've broken it up into two blog entries so we can address both issues separately:

"My biggest challenge is being a novice gardener with terrible soil.  We moved to Paso Robles, CA  (45 minutes north of San Luis Obispo), about 3 years ago.  We have this rock hard soil, which is almost impossible to dig around in, and it doesn't drain at all.  To top it off, we live in an area with temperature extremes.  It gets over 100 degrees here in the summer and have frequent frost and temperatures routinely below freezing ...