By Bruce McPherson, County Supervisor It’s an understandable instinct at the end of each calendar year to wrap up undone business and start the new...

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...

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...

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...

 Have you ever had any of these experiences?

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!

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 –