Springtime will soon be in the air and you and your family are invited to get take a break from the 9 to 5 and city life to experience the awakening of life. The Center For Land-Based Learning at the Farm on Putah Creek is hosting Welcome Back Springtime at the Farm on Putah Creek Sunday March 28, 2010 from 10:00am – 4:00pm. The Center For Land-Based Learning is a non-profit whose stated mission is to “engage youth in learning experiences on the land that foster respect for the critical interplay of agriculture, nature and society.” Under the leadership of Mary Kimball, Executive Director, the Center uses a network of farms, ranches, and natural ecosystems as educational laboratories for

The vacant spot next to the liquor mart could’ve been a sandwich shop, a travel agency, a cell-phone distributor, or a butcher. It could’ve been anything. But three days before Valentine’s Day, it opens its doors as a flower shop, and that’s nothing short of bloody brilliant. The morning of, I walk across the street to spend fifty bucks on a dozen pink roses, a little box of chocolates, a vase, and a teddy bear. The place is hardly put-together. Sparse shelves in the corners, milk-crate boxes used for tables, flowers propped up in paint buckets. One big refrigerator houses specialty roses with price-tags reaching eighty to a hundred bucks. The other flowers are reasonably priced. There’s

Artist, Jennifer J. O'Neill-Pickering is speaking the language of flowers at Capitol Public Radio through watercolors. Have you ever wondered what the veiled meaning is that is associated with a specific flower? Then, you might want to go view the twenty-three watercolor paintings by artist, Jennifer J. O'Neill-Pickering, on display at Capital Public Radio through June 26th. Different cultures and different periods of time have assigned various meanings to flowers and some of these are still with us today. During Victorian England, these meanings developed into a language called Floriography. People then selected different flower bouquets to convey various thoughts and feelings to their f

Unseasonable rain showers have kept maypole dancing to a minimum for the first few days of May.  But longtime dwellers of the Central Valley know to keep their shorts and tank tops handy. It is going to be scorching hot soon.  Spring is effectively over.  Like a clock-watcher at the end of her work shift, spring is so out of here the moment the summer sun arrives, and nobody is going to see her mild days and chilly nights again until 2010. So forget looking up at the cloudy skies.  Look down on the ground.  Wildflowers -- or weeds, if you please -- tell us that summer is coming.  If you've done any crawling around in the grass in the last week or two, you'll have noticed that most wild

Leaving the house can be somewhat of a chore. Some days it's nice to be secluded in my apartment, reading or watching television. However, once I step foot outside of the apartment, I immediately feel a warm pleasantness come over me. Rick's garden sprawls across the small front yard. The garden is an explosion of all kinds of different plants, colors and textures. With every new day of spring and summer, there is always something new and interesting blooming, making for a pleasant surprise. There are traditional beauties like roses and irises, but also plants to satisfy unusual tastes such as Mullens, which grow over six feet and are covered in pods and look as if they arrived from anoth