Sage has long been used to sooth scratchy and irritated throats. Photo/Melinda Myers LLC

By Melinda Myers

Busy schedules, over indulging, and strenuous summer activities can lead to sore muscles, indigestion and headaches. When searching for pain relief, look no further than your own garden or your local farmer’s market. These five foods fresh from the garden – or pot – are packed with super pain-relieving and anti-inflammatory power.

Mint

Infuse mint into your tea or ice water to refresh and rejuvenate, so you’re ready for more summer fun. Mint also helps relieve headaches and general aches and pain. Grow this vigorous perennial herb in a container so it won’t overtake your other plants.  Then at the end of the season, root a few cuttings to start new plants to grow indoors. All you need is a sunny window, quality potting mix and regular watering.

Hot peppers

Capsaicin, the spicy element in chili, jalapeno, habanero and cayenne peppers, is a great pain-fighting tool and is often used in topical creams to help treat backaches, arthritis and muscle pain. Hot peppers are ready to harvest when they are fully colored. Ask friends to share their harvest or purchase hot peppers at your local farmer’s market if your garden is lacking this plant. Be sure to purchase extra hot peppers to dry and enjoy year-round. Then add these tasty and pain-relieving plants to your garden next summer. Plant them after the soil and air warm, at the same time you plant sweet peppers and tomatoes.

Cherries

Manage muscle pain and inflammation with sour cherries. They are loaded with disease fighting chemicals and antioxidants. Plus, they help fight inflammation and relieve pain. Purchase plenty of cherries to juice, dry and preserve so you can enjoy their health benefits all year long. And consider planting a sour cherry tree in your backyard. Montmorency is the most popular sour cherry tree, needing only 700 hours of air temperatures between 34 and 45 degrees to initiate flowering for fruit development.  New hardier dwarf introductions from the University of Saskatchewan can be grown in colder regions including zone 2. Although it takes several years for cherry plants to start producing fruit, you’ll enjoy watching your tree grow into maturity and bear its first crop. Just make sure to cover the plants with netting so the birds don’t eat your harvest.

Ginger

Grow ginger in a pot outdoors or sunny window along side your other indoor plants. Ginger helps reduce inflammation and combat migraines, muscle pain, arthritis and post workout or post-gardening soreness. All this and it helps fight nausea so common during a summer filled with barbecues and celebrations. Although it’s a tropical plant, you can find plants or rhizomes (the part you eat) online. Or join other enthusiastic gardeners who have had success rooting the rhizomes they have purchased at the grocery store to start new plants.

Sage

Harvest a few sage leaves, add hot water and brew a bit of sore throat relief. Sage tea has long been used to sooth scratchy and irritated throats and showed positive results in a 2006 clinical trial. Grow this herb in the garden or container. It thrives in a sunny spot with well-drained soil. Harvest leaves as needed throughout the season. Regular harvesting encourages more growth for future harvests. You can remove as much as one third of the plant at one time for preserving.

So next time you’re feeling a bit of pain, look to the garden for a bit of relief. Even the simple act of tending your garden and harvesting produce can elevate your mood, lower your blood pressure and start you on the road to feeling better.

Melinda Myers has written more than 20 gardening books, including “Small Space Gardening.” She hosts the Great Courses “How to Grow Anything” DVD series and the nationally syndicated “Melinda’s Garden Moment” TV and radio segments.

The rising price of houses at Lake Tahoe is not slowing down sales.

For the first half of 2018, prices are up 18 percent compared to 2017, with the median price at $679,500. The number sold is up 27 percent for the same time period.

The figures are provided by Chase International.

Million-dollar homes continue to soar. There was a 38 percent jump in homes sold for more than $1 million, while homes priced below the million-mark stayed flat. Tahoe City and Incline Village saw the biggest increase in the sale of million-dollar homes, up 44 and 46 percent, respectively. Incline Village continues to have the highest median-priced home, up 7 percent to $1,180,000. The price of a home in South Lake Tahoe, the lowest median on the lake, rose 12 percent to $502,500. 

The East Shore experienced the largest increase in homes sold for less than a million dollars, up 63 percent.

The price of Lake Tahoe condominiums also continues to rise, with the median price up 8 percent to $422,500. The overall sale of condos on the lake was up 9 percent in volume. 

The median price of a home in Truckee rose 10 percent to $737,500, with units sold for more than a million up 49 percent. Homes selling for less than $1 million was down 8 percent.  

— Lake Tahoe News staff report

By Ally Gravina, Moonshine Ink

Over the course of two summers in the late 1960s, a chunk of the Haight Ashbury psychedelic rock scene was picked up and dropped off in Kings Beach at the building we now know as the North Tahoe Event Center.

A converted bowling alley with 10-foot ceilings, the building was then a concert venue called Kings Beach Bowl that hosted the likes of Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Neil Young with Buffalo Springfield, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Grateful Dead — to name a few.

Seating 500 people, the building located next to the lake in the center of Kings Beach was owned and operated by Dave Jay and Allen Goodall.

Read the whole story

·      Tahoe Transportation District will have a public hearing at the board meeting on July 13 at 9:30am at the Stateline office to discuss three proposals for transit on the South Shore. Go online for more info.

·      Placer Mosquito and Vector Control District reported a mosquito sample has tested positive for West Nile virus this week. The sample was collected from a site along the county’s western border. 

·      Dates have been set for the 2019 Mountain Bike Festival in Meyers – June 22-23.

·      The Placer County Grand Jury weighed in on what it thinks the county is doing regarding affordable housing. Here is the report.

·      Ski Run Marina is having a mural dedication on July 18, 6:30pm. Charles Goldman, who is credited with much of Lake Tahoe’s preservation, will be there to read a poem.

Mysis shrimp were introduced to Lake Tahoe in the 1960s. Photo/Robin Li/ Seamor Marine Ltd.

By Tom Lotshaw

A UC Davis research team led by civil and environmental engineering professors Geoff Schladow and Alex Forrest, along with environmental science and policy Professor Steve Sadro, is working on a pilot project to test and optimize a strategy to reduce Mysis shrimp populations in Emerald Bay and Lake Tahoe.

Working with the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, the team aims to reduce the abundance of Mysis shrimp, one of Tahoe’s most ubiquitous invasive species, to levels where they no longer impact the ecosystem of the lake.

Mysis shrimp were deliberately introduced into Tahoe in the 1960s to provide a food source for lake trout and kokanee salmon, popular sport fish that had also been introduced.

“The Lake Tahoe ecosystem has changed dramatically in the last 50 years, and the importance of restoring ecological function of the lake’s native species in place of the invasive Mysis shrimp cannot be overstated,” Schladow said. “Our findings in Emerald Bay will be critical in developing a plan and strategy for Lake Tahoe.”

If the number of Mysis shrimp can be reduced, native zooplankton species like daphnia, which play a critical role in eating other, smaller native zooplankton species that can reduce lake clarity, will be able to recover to levels not seen since Mysis shrimp were established in the lake. That could lead to a significant improvement in water clarity—one of the long-term restoration goals for Lake Tahoe.

The research team is using real-time, remote sensing technologies to locate high-density patches of Mysis shrimp and map out the natural variability in the distribution and migration of these organisms throughout Emerald Bay. If successful, the technology and tools developed through this pilot project will be used to provide guidance for harvesting Mysis shrimp in the rest of the lake.

The use of underwater remote sensing draws on Forrest’s research experience with autonomous underwater vehicles as data collection platforms. If this pilot project is successful, the team will use similar platforms in the future in other parts of Lake Tahoe that can’t be surveyed using boat-based techniques.

“Applying emerging technologies and untethered, autonomous robotics enables an understanding of aquatic habitat and ecosystem assessment not available today,” Forrest said.

The California Tahoe Conservancy contributed $390,000 in Proposition 1 funding and Nevada Division of State Lands provided $60,000 in federal funds through the Clean Water Act for this project.

Tom Lotshaw is the public information officer at TRPA. This was first published in the summer 2018 Tahoe In Depth.

By Scott Ramirez

On Tuesday I drove through South Lake Tahoe and counted “no vacancy” signs. I only saw one.  You might think this is not a big deal until you realize that it was July 3 and our town is full. 

Understanding that this is far from an accurate accounting of the state of our motel Industry, it is a departure from what I remember in past years, before the internet turned weekend rentals into a VHR invasion. In past years the “no vacancy” sign was an indicator of how full our town was, but those days are vanishing under the draw of easy homes to rent for a few nights stay. It is no wonder our motels have not been kept current given their business has been redirected to VHRs.

It is no wonder that VHRs are hugely popular considering a family can stay together, park together come and go as they please and not be bothered by strangers in the next room. They can order up a house and move in for the weekend with the click of a mouse. Few would question the popularity and draw this has for our town. The question remains, is this what we want for our neighborhoods? Is there no space left for families to live full time at Tahoe and not be inundated by a new batch of guests every weekend? Nearly every block within city limits has at least one if not more VHRs in their midst. If you listen to a scanner on any busy night, you can hear the calls for VHR complaints that pop up all over town.

My family has been lucky, most of the guests that stay across the street from us have been pleasant and interesting to meet. The owner is friendly and has reached out to mitigate problems and the huge house will likely increase the implied value of my own home. It all sounds great until you get one bad guest. One bad guest means it is up to me to count people staying the night, up to me to count cars parking and up to me to listen for bumps in the night.  If there is a problem, it is up to me to report it to the police and hope there is no retribution from the one bad guest who I just reported and will soon return to their own home.  After your first bad guest, your home is never the same. You are left with the question of whether the next will repeat this whole process and you are once again confronted by that one bad guest.

VHRs do bring business to town and they do create revenue. The question remains whether the tourists who are the bread and butter of our town will return to stay in a smaller selection of VHRs and once more fill our motels as they have in past years. What the VHR industry is failing to admit is that a reduced number of rooms will result in higher room rates. Higher room rates will result in more room taxes being collected. There is a chance the city could see higher income generated by reducing the number of VHRs, assuming our guests return and fill the motels as they have in past years. This is the same reason SnowGlobe is so popular with our local businesses, funneling 20,000 additional guests on an already busy weekend causes room rates to go up because rooms become scarce (a reduced supply with increased demand means more profits). The same is true of VHRs, reduce the number available and the rates for the remaining rooms will increase. I am sure those running VHRs will insist their guests will not return to stay in motels, but history suggests this is not accurate.

The Tahoe Neighborhoods Group has a ballot measure to restrict VHRs to the established tourist core. This would phase in over a three-year period to allow VHR owners outside the tourist core the chance to decide what to do with their second homes. It is a fair minded approach to returning our neighborhoods to be residential areas and not an extension of the long established tourist core. Please take the time to read this initiative and consider voting for it. You will likely hear that this measure will cause all sorts of mayhem for our city but remember, this is not a simple issue and those that say they know for certain what will happen are not being truthful. None of us knows for certain that reducing the number of VHRs will simply reduce the number of people visiting or cause our motels to fill again and rates for rooms go up. The city will pay for a survey and the VHR companies will cite past TOT numbers but neither can answer the question of how our guests will react. The only thing we do know is that our neighborhoods are being invaded. My neighborhood is no place for one bad guest.

Scott Ramirez is a resident of South Lake Tahoe.

The Nevada Department of Public Safety, Sex Offender Registry has received reports of a potential scam in an effort to collect money from registered sex offenders.

Calls are being made to offenders informing them they are non-compliant with their registration requirements, that a warrant has been issued for their arrest and that the offender must pay a fine in order to be compliant.

Sex offenders are required by law to register in Nevada and failure to comply is a felony offense; however, the Nevada DPS and local law enforcement do not collect money from sex offenders for registration or for warrants issued.

What to do if a suspected scam phone call is received:

•           Do not give out personal or work information

•           Do not arrange to meet with the caller

•           Do not make a payment to the caller

•           Immediately report the call to local law enforcement

•           Contact the Sex Offender Registry for compliance status at 775.684.6262.

Volunteers picked up 1,458 pounds of trash from Lake Tahoe beaches on July 5.

It took 499 people to remove the litter left behind from those spending July 4 here.

Cleanup participants gathered at five locations around Lake Tahoe, and together removed litter from six miles of shoreline, including Commons Beach in Tahoe City, Kings Beach, Kiva Beach, Nevada Beach and Regan Beach on the South Shore.

Volunteers sorted and counted the items collected.

Single-use plastics were the most commonly-found trash item, along with 8,061 cigarette butts and 18,235 pieces of plastic, which includes cups, lids, bottle caps and food wrappers.

Registration is open for the  8th annual Rose to Toads mountain bike ride.

The ride is Sept. 2.

At more than 62 miles long with 8,000-plus feet of climbing and 10,000-plus feet of descent, Rose to Toads is one of the toughest mountain bike rides around. 

One hundred percent of the proceeds go back to the organizations that build the trails featured on the ride: TAMBA, the Tahoe Rim Trail Association, the U.S. Forest Service-Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit, and Nevada State Parks.

It takes most riders all day to complete Rose to Toads, which showcases some of the best trails from Lake Tahoe’s North Shore at Mount Rose all the way to the South Shore, ending on the famous Mr. Toads Wild Ride.

This ride is completely self-supported.

To register, go online.

Steph Curry of the Warriors will be back next week at the American  Century Championship. Photo Copyright 2017 Carolyn E. Wright

By Noel Harris, Sacramento Bee

Vince Carter may be the NBA’s elder statesman, but he’s out to prove that no one is ever too old to try something new.

The Kings swingman will get to show off his golf swing next week, when he participates in the American Century Championship for the first time.

Carter, 41, joins a field in the celebrity tournament that is loaded with athletes, actors and notable names. This year’s event, the 29th annual, features several athletes with Northern California ties,

Read the whole story