The Flower Fields at Carlsbad Ranch opened Friday The final day? It’s always Mother’s Day, which is May 12 in 2019. El Nino rain in February should mean magnificent Flower Fields at Carlsbad Ranch blooms now in session through May 12. Mellano & Company of San Luis Rey is the production arm and onsite grower. The Ecke family owns the land. Over 50 acres are devoted to…
Like the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who kept on fighting despite being torn apart limb by limb, California Pacific Airlines chief Ted Vallas said Tuesday his troubled 10-year airline project would fly again “within three months.” California Pacific Airlines flew for one month last year, incurred large debts, grounded its airplane, left employees without payments, got kicked out of the…
Hike around the natural habitats of San Diego County and it becomes abundantly clear that honey bees, foreign to the area, are everywhere. A new study by Keng-Lou James Hung, Jennifer Kingston, Adrienne Lee, David Holway and Joshua Kohn of UC San Diego’s Division of Biological Sciences, published on Feb. 20 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that honey bees focus their foraging on…
During the partial federal shutdown in December 2018 and January 2019, news reports showed furloughed government workers standing in line for donated meals. These images were reminders that for an estimated one out of eight Americans, food insecurity is a near-term risk. In California, where I teach, 80 percent of the population lives in cities. Feeding the cities of the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area,…
Stone Brewing officials this week confirmed reports the company would consolidate Escondido and Vista facilities and re-assign some employees. The number of employees being re-assigned within North County was unspecified although Stone CEO Dominic Engels confirmed he was among that number. “We have a good amount of unused space in our national distribution facility in Vista, so that will be where most of the team…
Today, surrounded by freezing temperatures, thousands of heads of lettuce grow, nestled in a cozy greenhouse fed by nutrient-rich nitrates. Or you could call it what it is: fish poop. The process, called aquaponics, allows farmers to grow local, organic produce anywhere at any time of year. Aquaponics is a sustainable method of farming that combines aquaculture (raising fish) and hydroponics (cultivating plants in water)….
It’s all over except the shouting, and lawsuits, for North County’s only airlines, or at least the 2-month version of one, as California Pacific Airlines blew up this week in the darkened skies of a reported debt of at least $6 million and apparent mismanagement. California Pacific Airlines, launched flights on Nov. 1 last year from Carlsbad’s McClellan-Palomar Airport to San Jose, only to halt service in…
John Van Doorn, former business editor of the North County Times, managing editor of the New York Post and a New York Times editor, among other avocations, had this thing about rain. “Wet stuff,” Van Doorn would say. “If anybody around here uses the cliche of ‘wet stuff,’ for any reason, under any circumstances, they’re fired.” With that in mind, Escondido, North County and the…
After 10 years of effort, Carlsbad’s McClellan-Palomar Airport-based California Pacific Airlines finally took flight on November, 2018. It flew high for a whole month before being grounded, kicked out of the state of South Dakota and sued. A long-time pursuit of Ted Vallas, a 97-year-old Rancho Santa Fe businessman with an ambitious plan to pick up the traditionally failing Carlsbad passenger traffic market, the airlines may never…
Avocados are all the rage these days. My sons don’t seem to understand their important role when it comes to supplying avocados to the family. Our older lad, who has a house in Los Angeles, has a large back yard filled with successful fruit trees — limes, lemons, grapefruit and two large guava trees. For six months, I pressured him to rip out a guava…