"Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter." Julius Comroe Jr. Looking for a change of pace last month, my wife and I opted to sleep on the marble slab called a futon instead of our comfy bed. I was awakened after dawn by her exclaiming, "Oh! That’s why […]
Life + Outdoors
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Happy at home
Dow’s Prairie artist Susan Fox [with her collie, Niki] has spent just one year in her current garden, but she’s spent most of her life in Humboldt County. (To see her art, check out her show at Miller Farms in April.) Here’s what she has to say about her life as a gardener: What’s the […]
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Logger Heaven
There it was, corralled behind a thin rope inside a grassy expanse at Redwood Acres: the retired figure-conscious logger’s dreambike. No, nothing noisy or fume-spewing, chrome-boasting or rubber-laying – those kinds of bikes are for sissies. This was a deceptively delicate, spindly blond wood affair, stationary, with the playful look of an old Flexible Flyer© […]
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Wilderness Rx
As I gaze back over the 15 odd "Off The Pavement" articles I have penned for the Journal, it would seem one big theme has emerged. I might define my overall interpretation of them as something like, the necessity of being outside.So if this theme has appealed to you, then you are in luck. This […]
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Bypass the State
My dad told me in 1956 that the Willits bypass would not be built in his lifetime. He died in 1980. Now it appears the bypass may not be built in my lifetime. Last Wednesday (Feb. 28) the California Transportation Commission derailed a $177 million funding plan for the bypass and gave that money to […]
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In the Dark
The power in Garberville first went off Tuesday morning, probably around 10 a.m. Within a half hour, the power had been restored. Then, shortly after 11, we lost it again, and this time it was gone for 28 hours. The PG&E hotline was scant on details, stating only that the outage was caused by "winter […]
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In the Dark (II)
It will always amuse me that people who live in a temperate rain forest are seemingly never prepared for what pours down from a February sky. As often happens on the North Coast at this time of year, our power went out on a particularly stormy afternoon last week, and wasn’t restored until two days […]
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Taming the Wildearth
In this ongoing series of Humboldt County gardeners telling it like it is, Eureka gardener and landscape designer Donna Wildearth (right) has stepped up to bat. She owns Garden Visions Landscape Design and she teaches at College of the Redwoods. "Between my business and my teaching," she says, "I feel happily immersed in the world […]
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Trinity Alps Rambles
When some of us think of the Alps, we envision long waits in our cars as fire crews remove logs that have trundled hundreds of feet down to the 299 from blackened hillsides that lead up to the vertiginous slopes of the remote Wilderness Area. What the uninitiated don’t know is that the Alps are […]
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Sunshine, Symbols and Remembrance
The sun came out Monday and everybody seemed drunk on it. Down in town, in Arcata, a man in one backyard had pulled off his shirt to bare his muscled pale arms to the warmth. A woman in her garden was in a tank top. Everyone dangled jackets and sweaters under their arms as they […]
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Scourge of the gophers
Welcome to the second in a series of interviews with Humboldt County gardeners. Today’s chatty gardener is Janet Sclar. She’s been gardening in Hydesville for six years, and she works as a farmer’s market vendor and does customer service and web design for her husband’s mail-order nursery business, Amity Heritage Roses. What’s the best thing […]