Old-fashioned ideas are often the best. Gardeners are discovering that practices and attitudes valued by generations past can let us live lightly upon the earth as well as supply us with an abundance of fresh produce.

Bits of advice that were dismissed as silly fun, like planting vegetables when the oak leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear, turned out to have an ounce of truth.

"Farmer Fred" Hoffman (www.farmerfred.com) and I recently spoke about tips that are just as good now as they were then. We gleaned our information from old books and conversations with gardeners.

TRENDS: Vegetable gardens are back:

It's the GIY age: Grow It Yourself. When your grandparents talked about the garden, they meant the vegetable garden. But for the past 20 or 30 years, having a garden meant you were interested in perennials, English gardening, or perhaps Asian gardens. Now, once again, when you say you have a garden, people assume it's a vegetable garden.

Produce prices have skyrocketed. It's cheaper to grow your own. And we've realized that food isn't environ- mentally cheap if produce is shipped long distances. And we know we can trust the safety of the food we grow ourselves.

People are reconnecting with their food supply:

A sixth-grade science teacher at a local school took the kids into the school garden for the day's lesson. She pulled a carrot out of the garden, and one of the students asked her why she had put the carrot in the ground.

Kids used to know eggs came from chickens, milk and cheese from cows, vegetables and fruits from the garden. That disconnect between the food supply and ourselves is changing one school garden at a time, one gardener at a time. One of the fastest- growing populations of gardeners is young women, and their crop of choice is salad greens. These new gardeners are urban techies who have their Blackberries and iPods but want to learn how to knit and grow broccoli.

Everyone wants to be green:

Green used to be common sense. It meant being thrifty. Well, those times are back. Not only are more of us growing vegetables, we're doing it in an eco-friendly way. More of us recycle, use only what we need, put back into the earth what we take out. We increasingly want to be thrifty with the Earth's resources.

Buying local:

We have grapes from Chile, peppers from Mexico, tomatoes from Canada. But many people are looking to buy from local farmers, and forgoing those tomatoes shipped during the dead of winter from the Southern Hemisphere.

Think birds and bees:

You restore balance when you create shelter and feeding spots for birds, beneficial insects and wildlife. Consider this: One-third of human food supplies depends on pollination by insects. Further, if there were no bees, 100,000 plant species would cease to exist.

TIPS: Cut an unripe tomato in half and rub the juice on your hands to remove stubborn green stains.

If birds are eating or uprooting seedlings, make a fake predator bird. Stick feathers into a large potato and hang it over or near the garden. Move it around each week or so. The gaudier the better.

Slugs hate the smell of peppermint, spearmint and elder, so make an infusion from the leaves, then pour or spray it around the plants you want to protect. The slugs will stay away.

Use hot salty water on paths to kill weeds.

They say the old-time farmer used to sit bare-bottomed on the soil to see if it was still too cold to plant. You have permission to substitute your elbow.

Mulch lightly so plants go to seed where they might:

Warren Roberts, superintendent of the UCD Arboretum, says the old gardeners he grew up around mulched lightly in areas where they wanted seedlings because sometimes the best gardens are the ones that plant themselves. Gardeners have again learned to appreciate the spontaneity, the serendipity, of nature. Roberts says to leave seedlings unless it's inconvenient. In my garden, I never move Tower of Jewels (Echium wildprettii) seedlings. I let the seedlings duke it out among themselves for survival.

Call The Bee's Pat Rubin, (916) 321-1075.