Nutrition & Health

Advice for the Home Gardener from the Help Desk of the UC Master Gardener Program of Contra Costa County Help Desk Request: I'm delighted you're available to help diagnose garden problems! Below are four pictures of a grape leaf problem.

The National School Lunch Program provides nutritionally balanced free and reduced price lunches to children of low income families in need. The summer time can be difficult for those families as children are not provided a healthy meal when school is out.

Direct marketing, for some farmers and ranchers, can be a way to capture more of the consumer dollar. By bypassing the middlemen - wholesalers, distributors, and retailers - direct marketing can allow a producer to receive retail value for his or her product.

What's for dinner? A crab spider, camouflaged in our lavender patch, didn't catch a honey bee, a butterfly, an ant or a syrphid fly. No, it nailed a green bottle fly. We couldn't help but notice. The fly's metallic blue-green coloring stood in sharp contrast to the white spider.

He has been called the Elvis of E. coli and the Sinatra of Salmonella, and now Carl Winter, a UC Cooperative Extension food toxicologist for 32 years, will rock and roll his way into retirement on July 1, 2019.

Lovin' the lavender... If you attended the Lavender Festival last weekend at the six-acre Araceli Farms at 7389 Pitt School Road, Dixon, you were in for a real treat.

(June 17-23 is National Pollinator Week.

Note: This post is first of a series in which we will recap our UC ANR Urban Agriculture Workshops. We'll share key points, as well as links to videos and handouts. Even if you couldn't make it in person, you can still access the content.

Native Americans suffer from the highest rates of food insecurity, poverty and diet-related disease in the United States. A new study finds that Native American communities could improve their food security with a greater ability to hunt, fish, gather and preserve their own food.

Advice for the Home Gardener from the Help Desk of the UC Master Gardener Program of Contra Costa County MGCC Help Desk Request: What's going on with my persimmon tree? I worked a bunch of compost into the soil around it in the spring and mulched with leaves. But it looks like it needs nutrients.