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Tucked on window sills and tabletops, my houseplants clean the air and provide indoor beauty while the landscape outdoors is mostly resting. They are easy to keep healthy if I follow a few tips during the dark days of winter. it’s their time to...

What do you get when you combine a community builder, entrepreneur and innovative problem solver? Greg Wimp. In 2020, Greg, owner of four local Togo’s businesses in Santa Cruz County, donated thousands of sandwiches throughout our county to fire evacuees, first responders, frontline workers, salon...

Recently, the County won approval from the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board to make it easier for survivors of the CZU Fire to get started on an important aspect of rebuilding their homes. Rather than going to the Regional Water Board for approval...

They say you are what you eat, and what we eat plays an important role in our mental health—everything from how we sleep, to how we handle stress and our overall mood. It has even been shown that dietary improvement can reduce symptoms of...

Our Santa Cruz County court will soon begin our process of interviewing and selecting our 2024-25 Civil Grand Jury, and we hope you will consider applying. Serving on the grand jury is a tremendous opportunity to support our local community and to contribute to the...

My friend Evan is a computer whiz and designed my website and blog. He is often researching on the internet and forwards me interesting tidbits of information about plants whenever he comes across something exceptional. I am always amazed at what nature does to...

“In the world of finance, the best accounting is like poetry—precise, impactful and timeless.” —Daniel Adams Every New Year, calculate your present resources, income, expenditures and cash flow. Eight accounting classes helped me do financial “dream planning” well while proudly wearing CFP therapist, economist and...

It’s been a cooler summer than the past few years. I’ve probably jinxed it now by mentioning that, thereby ensuring August will be a scorcher. But for now plants are happy they haven’t had to cope much with the “dreaded over-86-degree” weather when they...

Some Santa Cruz Mountain residents have taxes so simple they fit on form 1040 alone—wages and pensions—and they don’t need an alphabet to complicate their taxes. The IRS divides income into three “baskets”—ordinary, capital gains and passive—and discourages offsetting losses from one basket from...

The assignment: create a cutting garden. For a designer this is the best kind of request. Until about 100 years ago, one of the most important areas of any large garden was the cutting garden where flowers were harvested like a crop and taken...