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Once upon a time when our area was underwater there were no parks or trails or trees or gardens. I'm thankful that our mountains rose from an ancient ocean so we could enjoy this beautiful place we call home.  I'm thankful for the Bigleaf maples that shower me with...

Whether you want them to or not all gardens change with time. It’s part of nature that the fittest survive. Possibly you have different ideas of what you want your garden to look like but it’s hard to fool Mother Nature. Several years ago...

Every drop of rain that hits bare soil is destructive. Over 3,000 years ago the Chinese protected their soil from erosion and increased fertility by planting cover crops. Early Nile Valley inhabitants also practiced this method of agriculture as did first century Romans. Lupines...

As a plant-derived substance, resveratrol can be found in various dietary sources including grapes, berries, peanuts, and red wine. Another important source of resveratrol is the Japanese knotweed, which has long been used in Japan and China as a traditional herbal remedy. Interestingly, the grape and more precisely the grape skin contains the highest concentration of resveratrol. Consequentially, red wine seems to be the most concentrated food source of resveratrol found in human diet. However, it is not possible to absorb the recommended therapeutic doses of resveratrol by drinking wine or through dietary sources.

   In the 1960s, the BBC was playing over and over for its listeners…Elvis Presley’s latest hit about writing a letter to a lost love –

I was talking with a neighbor the other day, and I asked him how life was going. He replied, ‘Oh, you know, it’s like an EKG graph; up and down.”  This got me thinking about the heartbeat of life. It does consist of up and down phases. With Covid-19, social justice issues, and politics, this has been a challenging year. These stressors are on top of the other difficulties we are already experiencing in our own personal lives. Then came the fires, which pushed most all of us over the edge into emotional exhaustion. In the heartbeat of life, we are definitely experiencing a down phase on that EKG graph!

Santa Cruz’s Good Times weekly has purchased the Press-Banner from Tank Town Media just as the Santa Cruz Mountains newspaper prepares to celebrate its 60th year of publishing.

To better inform our readership for the upcoming elections, we reached out to each candidate for the Scotts Valley City Council.  Over the course of a few weeks, we reached out several times to give them ample time for thoughtful responses to these questions:   

 There is so much clean up to do around the garden in the fall but I think we should all do something fun. A couple years ago I got an email about when to plant sweet peas. This reader had collected seeds from the wild pea, lathyrus latifolia, and wanted to know when to plant them. Although the flowers of this perennial sweet pea are not fragrant, the culture is the same as all sweet peas. Now’s the time to plant.