Robert "Skip" Richter (Houston, TX), author of Cool Springs Press' Texas Month-by-Month Gardening (due to publish in 2014), is a horticulturist, gardening educator, garden writer, and avid horticultural photographer. Skip received his master's degree in horticulture from Texas A&M University and has gone on to manage Master Gardener programs in Montgomery, Travis, and Harris counties, where he currently coordinates over 250 volunteers. He helped develop a variety of environmental gardening programs, including the Extension's Don't Bag It yard waste recycling programs, the Composting for Kids educational web page, and the Grow Green environmental education program. Skip serves as a contributing editor for Texas Gardener magazine and has appeared weekly on the Central Texas Gardener television program for over a decade. He has gardened in the brush country of south Texas, the rocky hills of the Missouri Ozarks, the acid sands of the East Texas piney woods, the semiarid climate and high-pH soils of central Texas, and the humid, hot climate and black clays of southeast Texas. YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/skiprgarden