Lifestyle

For a town of just 12,000 or so, Healdsburg is rife with festivals. Wine festivals. Food festivals. Art festivals. Jazz festivals. Songwriting festivals. Tech festivals. The list grows each year. And let 2024 be known as the year that the “Design Healdsburg” festival came to...

Old-timers in Healdsburg remember that, come harvest time, it wasn’t the smell of fermentation from winegrapes that wafted over town, with its promise of a better vintage, but another smell: that of sun-drying prunes. “You could smell it everywhere—and you either loved it or you...

Now, the core crew of 200 or so Edge Esmeralda participants who walked, biked and boarded around town this month—plus hundreds of others who dropped in for shorter stints—are preparing to vacate their Healdsburg hotel rooms, or wherever else they found to crash. And plenty of locals are left wondering what just happened, if anything at all...

An increasingly popular local festival returns this year as Scarecrows on the Plaza, bringing the Healdsburg community together to support the arts and Healdsburg youth at Boys & Girls Clubs of Sonoma-Marin.

Inside the Healdsburg Community Center near the north end of town, formerly the home of Foss Creek Elementary, two of the school’s old classrooms are newly renovated and filled with children again—this time, even younger. The rooms are bustling with the sounds of cooing babies, giggling toddlers and active preschoolers...

Danya Richter, who has co-owned the Healdsburg Bar and Grill since 2000, has a new general partner and celebrity chef Charlie Palmer onboard to direct the kitchen at locals favorite HBG.

This year the Gay Wine Weekend becomes even more closely tied to Healdsburg, with the Lodge at Healdsburg on Grove Street serving as unofficial headquarters. As well as the winery tours and winemaker dinners, the signature events continue this year for the most part at Healdsburg-area locations.

While all the nominated plants are found in the area, Healdsburg Garden Club did limit its list to native plants, though some are widely found outside Healdsburg’s city limits. The proposal included four flowers: the Douglas iris, the yellow mariposa lily, scarlet fritillary and blue-eyed grass, the once ubiquitous California native grape, and the familiar oak trees of the region.

“I think one of the things that people don’t think about is how long the produce lasts,” said Janet Ciel, Healdsburg Farmers Market manager. “So you buy from a farmer’s market that was picked that morning or the night before, but when you buy from a grocery store, that same head of lettuce, it’s three or four or five days in a freaking truck before you ever get it to your home!”

Don’t look now, but it’s almost Christmas. It may be too late to come up with the perfect celebration, but maybe not—several area restaurants have created special menus and events for the last big holiday of the year. Start off early on Christmas Eve with...