Lifestyle

For more than seven years Virginia City has been having fun with “Cemetery Gin” a Nevada-made spirit available at local saloons, bars and stores throughout Northern Nevada which celebrates a tall tale from the Comstock’s rich mining days of the 1850s.

Spearheaded by the Virginia City Tourism Commission, the gin is a product of Frey Ranch Estate Distillery, located in Fallon, Nev., where all the ingredients were grown, distilled and bottled.

The 30th Annual Interfaith Community Memorial Service was held for civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship of Northern Nevada on Sunday with a message of “The Power of Unity.”

I’m a big fan of Rodale’s “Organic Life.” In it, I found author Sarah West’s article on “The 5 Biggest Seed-Starting Mistakes You’re Making.” Many gardeners start their own seeds each year. Sometimes things don’t go as well as we might like.

Join the KaiaFIT crew for a free Share The Love workout on Saturday, January 16th at the Minden KaiaFIT location (2231 Meridian Blvd, Suite 2). New, old, and current Kaia girls are welcome. We'll be doing a fun and motivating workout, led by Nikki Warren, from 8-9am. All ages and fitness levels are encouraged and supported at KaiaFIT.

Often, gardeners focus on the plants in their landscape. However, successful plants rely on healthy soils to support them; hence, the old saying “Feed the soil, not the plant.” In northern Nevada, soils are extremely variable and often challenge the gardener. Learning more about soil and about improving it, will help you develop a beautiful and productive garden or landscape.

Come join the KaiaFIT girls for our monthly Ski and Snowboard day. All current and past Kaia Girls are welcome - bring your friends and family too. This is a non-coached event full of outdoor fun and a great time to Share the Kaia Love. We will be meeting in both of the Heavenly parking lots at 10:30am on January 21st. Please RSVP on our Facebook event or email carson@kaiafit.com so we know to wait for you.

Nevada Humane Society wants you to ring in the New Year by making a resolution to neuter your male dog or cat during their Happy Neuter Year campaign. At this time, the only appointments left are for small, male dogs and male cats.

I received an unusual foliage plant for Christmas. The leaves look like elongated elephant ears about 12 inches long. They are glossy dark green with silvery-white veins and reddish-green undersides.

They are narrow and wavy. After extensive searching online, I found out it is Alocasia sanderiana, commonly called Sander’s Alocasia, elephant ear or Kris (after some kind of foreign dagger). This plant originates in the Philippines. It is a beautiful and unique looking specimen.

Whenever I go to The Greenhouse Project at Carson High School in Carson City, I learn something new. This week it was about which kinds of beneficial insects work best in a greenhouse at this time of year. Pests can be a constant challenge in the optimum environment of a greenhouse.

A warm December day has me dreaming about gardening. My book My Garden Helper – What to do each month and How to do it, circa 1933, caught my eye. The first line reads “Gardening is easy. The beauty of it is that you can do the job on as small or as large a scale as you like, from a flower pot to a park.” I like the illusion that gardening at the park level is easy.

If you have houseplants, it is likely that you occasionally have little black gnats flying around the house. Although these tiny pests are barely visible, they become annoying as they buzz around your face. The gnats are actually short-lived flies that infest the potting soil of houseplants. They can go from egg to adult in about 17 days, depending on temperature, with larvae emerging from the eggs in four to six days. They develop more quickly with higher temperatures. There can be multiple generations in a year. Adults live approximately one week and may lay up to 300 eggs

I have a confession to make. For years, I have spoken disparagingly about people who prune their plants, particularly junipers, into little green meatballs with power hedge trimmers. However, recently I borrowed my friend Roni’s electric hedge trimmer and I think I’m hooked. I had seen her pruning her lavender plants with it last year. It took her about 15 minutes to prune all the dead flowers off her plants while it took me hours to do mine by hand, cut by cut.

Just when you thought your summer battles with insects were over, I have to remind you about insect infestations on houseplants. Your houseplants may be at risk if you recently brought outdoor container plants into the house. Usually containerized plants pick up hitchhiking insects while they are outdoors and these travelers start breeding when brought into a warm interior.

The Nevada Department of Agriculture (NDA) released the Buy Nevada Holiday Gift Guide for the 2015 holiday season.

Available online, the Buy Nevada catalog highlights Buy Nevada members. With more than 100 businesses from around the state, showcasing the many food and agriculture products produced or processed in Nevada to help consumers shop local on “Shop Local Saturday.”

Snow flurries have begun. The first storm dropped heavy “Sierra cement,” that wet slushy snow whose weight often damages plants. Here are a few tips for preventing winter injury to plants.

The long warm fall gave us a particular treat this year. The lovely weather let the red color in leaves completely develop, providing us with an amazing vibrant display. Too often cold weather hits in a flash, killing off leaves before their autumn pigments are revealed.

In the last week, leafhoppers have invaded our house both inside and out. Suddenly I’m seeing dozens of brown wedge-shaped insects crawling all over my windows and screens. They are even on the kitchen walls. These annoying critters, also called planthoppers, are less than a ¼-inch long, and they keep me busy squishing them each day. I decided to find out more about them.

Last week I spoke with Cory, The Greenhouse Project manager about aging apple trees at his house that an arborist suggested he cut down and replace with dwarf varieties.

Although the apples have always been fruitful, the arborist thinks these trees are almost at the end of their productive years. Cutting down these old, yet healthy, trees may be acceptable from the standpoint of apple production, but since they also serve as shade trees, they would be a great loss in the overall landscape.

As most column writers will tell you, reader reaction to columns you're particularly proud of can range from crickets to complaints to an occasional "good column" e-mail, phone call or comment.
And every so often, you catch lightning in a bottle.

What an amazing sight tonight (Tuesday) during the start of rush hour traffic. A family of five deer crossing the street at East Fifth and Stewart streets. Although against the light, they had sense to be "almost" in the crosswalk.

Comstock Mining Inc. CEO Corrado De Gasperis will speak on “Comstock Bonanzas and an Overview of the Global Gold Industry on Thursday, Oct. 29 at the Thursday Night Gold Hill Lecture Series. The series features local historians and performers to present the topic of their choice.

In the 1990s, I was the coordinator of the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension Master Gardener program for four counties. Volunteers signed up for 45 hours of horticulture classes in exchange for a fee and 45 hours of volunteering.

I had one very dedicated volunteer, Michael Janik, now of Michaels Apples, who went on to become a leader in Northern Nevada in raising, training and pruning apples and other fruits.

First-time author Jake Willers was inspired to write this children’s picture book after spending the past seven years filming urban bears. He recently produced a film entitled Urban Bears: Keeping Nevada’s Bears Wild! for Washoe County Health District and has presented wildlife programs as a wildlife expert filming around the globe for the National Geographic Channel International and for UK’s Channel 5. Jake currently resides in Reno.

People look at me funny when I say “Plant now” in October. This is the best time of year to plant trees, shrubs and even perennials. While this goes against common sense with winter’s low temperatures coming, trust me, plant anyway.

Since the microclimate around our house has temperatures similar to those at South Lake Tahoe, we are more likely to freeze than Carson City or Minden. Cold air is trapped on our property. At this time of year, I pay attention to the weather or lose my plants.

Now celebrating nearly 30 years, one of the most successful and enduring campaigns ever to come out of the Nevada Commission on Tourism is the “Loneliest Road in America” promotion designed to attract visitors to the very interesting rural cities found along Nevada’s Highway 50 corridor between Carson City and Baker. Or does it run between Baker and Carson City? Depends on where you begin, I suppose.

In its first entry into the Nevada Press Association‘s annual awards competition the Gold Hill-based Nevada Travel Network was awarded first place in two of the three categories it entered.

The blue ribbon for ‘Best Writing Online’ was awarded to the monthly NevadaGram and First Place in the ‘Best Feature Story Online’ category went to David Toll for “A visit to the Belmont Mill and Hamilton."

I’m fairly tolerant of most insects and spiders. I try to move them outside if I find them in the house rather than kill them. However, I do kill black widow spiders. It seems as if this was a banner year for black widows. I never used to find them in the house, only in the detached garage. Lately, I have found quite a few indoors.

Robert and Cecelia Stansbury had always planned to travel once they retired, but they had no idea where the journey would take them.

In preparation of leaving their jobs in the Bay area — he as a high school biology teacher and she as a legal assistant — they sold their share in a cabin in Hope Valley. With the proceeds, they bought an Airstream trailer.

Cooperative Extension’s Dr. Heidi Kratsch is a specialist in water efficient landscaping and has written a book on the subject – Water Efficient Landscaping in the Intermountain West. In a recent class, she provided techniques to conserve water without damaging the landscape.