Making your garden into a haven for wildlife

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• Learning from a garden’s living classroom

  Learning from a garden’s living classroom

  Named for the series of mountains visible in the distance, Garden of the Seven Sisters occupies a gently sloping half-acre adjacent to the University of California Cooperative Extension office. The garden is designed and maintained as a living classroom and working laboratory to teach the home gardener sustainable, science-based gardening practices.

  The sizes of the garden displays are created for the urban backyard. A small kitchen garden display shows how successive plantings in a limited space can provide a remarkable variety and plentiful supply of vegetables all year round.

  The orchard demonstrates how two or three fruit trees, planted in a single hole, can maximize use of limited space and lengthen the season of harvest. The garden also provides a variety of droughttolerant ornamental plants, including many California natives that attract birds, bees, and butterflies.

• New forest-management plan weakens wildlife protection

  New forest-management plan weakens wildlife protection

  Back in the 1980s, when conservation advocates were trying to stop logging in old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, they relied on a 1982 regulation that required the National Forest Service to protect wildlife such as the spotted owl throughout its range. They won, and a new Northwest forest plan in 1990 greatly reduced logging in the region's old-growth forests on federal land.

• Preach home in Los Osos: Eclectic style by design

  Preach home in Los Osos: Eclectic style by design

  Some retirees find comfort in the familiar, while others crave a fresh start. When Mike and Marie Preach retired from their careers as educators, their choice fell somewhere in between.

  The couple was living and working in Ventura County when their daughter and her family moved to Los Osos.

  “We would visit them on weekends and liked it so much, we thought someday we might move here,” said Mike.

• Rethinking the yard in drought-stricken regions

  Rethinking the yard in drought-stricken regions

  Texans watched disaster unfold slowly last year as a historic drought took a withering toll across the region.

• Letters to the Editor 10/12

  Letters to the Editor 10/12

  Tune in to truth ­ What is happening in Manhattan with the Wall Street demonstrations is a learning center. People are coming together and forming discussion groups and classes. If you are watching what is actually going on (Democracy Now.org, ReaderSupportedNews.org, etc.), you see the young people with the doctors, professors, economists, journalists, students, writers, musicians, union workers in all jobs, middle-aged and elder citizens, street people, and blue- and white-collar workers becoming educated together.

  They are criticized for not knowing everything from the start, but that is a ludicrous criticism. They know that something is wrong and that people in power have no intention of fixing it. We the people have to do it.

  The right wing is trying, in their usual frenzy, to say this is a riot of the fringe and is like various revolutions in history, but they don’t mention the obvious one. This movement is most like the American Revolution and the period where a young country worked to try