When I moved to the Bay last year I suffered some major culture shock — but I’m not talking about social culture shock. I’m talking about garden cultivation!

In the Midwest, plants tend to all follow similar needs and patterns. The pre-printed information on a plant or seed packet was rarely ever 100% accurate but sort of generally close. Out here, you may find something labeled “drought-tolerant” and “full sun” that requires 23 hours of shade a day and daily watering. But I don’t think it’s the labeler’s fault. We’ve got such crazy microclimates around the Bay that a plant that’s full sun in one spot can require full shade a mile away.

So I muddle through. I feel like I’m just starting out again, even though I’ve been a container gardener for nearly twenty years now. I was “that” person, the one everyone gave their dying plants to save. And my indoor plants are doing just fine. But man, everything I’ve put out in the yard to try to add a little groundcover to our bare patch of hardpan has turned brown. Well, almost everything. There’s a shady corner where the moss and the blue stars seem to thrive. Even the aloe is ailing and that prefers the climate here to that of the Midwest!

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Let’s face it, on paper, my life looks pretty boring.

I spend the largest chunk of my time sitting in front of a computer (…like right now…). I’m a designer who doesn’t really get to do design. Before I started working remotely, I was a cubicle-dweller, like most of the people who either started in or have worked their way up to the middle class. It was a nice cube — my employer prides itself on taking care of its employees — but it was still a cube, and still would be if I hadn’t moved too far away to commute. Unlike a pulp fiction hero, I actually have to do housework. I do live a few blocks from a fairly bad neighborhood, but, that’s Oakland. All the nice neighborhoods are a few blocks from the bad neighborhoods, and vice versa. You walk two minutes and your environment totally changes, but the crime and drugs tend to stay in the bad neighborhoods for the most part even though they’re so close. I don’t live on the edge of starvation, or desperation, or in danger if I sit on my porch after dark (well, not much anyway). The biggest danger I face these days is increased risk of heart attack from sitting too much at the computer, or spraining my index finger trying to type on my smartphone. I play far too many video games and my ideal morning is taking my Kindle out on the porch with a nice cup of tea or coffee. Not the stuff of legends.

But for all that, I’ve never been bored with my life. I love life. More importantly, I love my life. To me, everything that life has to offer is exciting. Sure, it’s not “exciting” in popular entertainment terms. I’m not being chased and shot at like in the vids. Hell no. I’ve been shot at. Trust me, it’s not like a vid. It’s not exciting and fun, even if watching it makes for entertaining fiction. When you duck for cover, if you spare the time to think up a witty one liner for your alluring companion, you’re probably dead before you can deliver it. Thanks, but no thanks.

What constitutes an adventure is all in how you look at the world around you. It’s all about finding new ways to challenge yourself, new ways to do something better than you did the day before. Intentionally taking the wrong turn and ending up at the ocean instead of the grocery. Looking for the details in your surroundings that you’ve missed before. When you go through life thinking adventure is a far away thing, distant from your day to day reality, you miss the wonders that face you every day.

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In the spirit of that contemplation, today I declare myself independent from my past, from everything that’s held me back or troubled me. I’ve meandered through the forest with no path, hoping that if I head in the same general direction it would get me there. But today I promise myself that where I do not find a path to follow, I will blaze one.

Part of the plan is to post here something approaching every day that I’m not out of town. It will be a record of my progress for me, and hopefully this daily writing will also spark some interesting articles on art, gardening, gaming, writing, cooking, linguistics, archaeology or any of the other topics that I regularly pursue.

When my day’s main thrust is web development or user interface design (my career), the posts will go to my portfolio blog, http://www.crysodenkirk.com. Everything else goes here.

Can I make posts about my life entertaining enough for anyone other than me or my immediate family to actually read them? Eh, maybe not (though trying to is part of the exercise). But the log will be here for me to look back over, a journal of my gardening experiments gone awry and cooking experiments gone amazing. We’ll see where we are in another year.

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That means it’s time to start over. The Mediterranean climate in the Bay is entirely different from southeast Wisconsin, and even my indoor plants are showing the effects of it. While there are, of course, some things that carry over in terms of practice, for all practical purposes, I need to learn how to garden almost from scratch again. But it’ll be so nice to be able to garden all year round!

I also have something here I haven’t had since moving out of my parents’ house: A yard. My housemates and I have decided to use part of the yard to grow fruits and vegetables for our own use and perhaps for donation to a local shelter if we come up with a harvest that’s too big for us to go through ourselves.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There are a few things that need to be done before starting our own little urban farm. That includes:

• Cleaning out and preparing the space. It sat all winter (which is a growing season here) without being maintained, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.
• Identifying the plants that are already there, what to keep, what to try to move, what to remove. It’s mostly flowers, with a fruit tree of some kind and a couple as-yet indeterminate vines and shrubs. The rosemary invading from the neighbor’s yard will definitely be staying though.
• Planning the beds and what to put in them. Part of this planning involves figuring out what will grow in our little corner of the Bay, and what plant rotation will make the best use of the space while requiring the least extra amending of the soil in the bed.

First order of planning? Figure out my new zone and the specs on our local micro-climate.

What’s my zone?

I had expected this to be a very easy question to answer. When I was in the Midwest, all the regional maps had these very broad bands that were easy to read and consistent, except maybe right at their edges. However, looking for zone maps out west, I found a lot of variety in terms of level of detail and some discrepancies between different versions, discrepancies that left me in one of three different zones and no good way to tell which.

An even bigger problem though is finding a version that’s detailed enough to figure out where I am on the map. Better Homes and Gardens claims to have highly detailed pdf versions, but they want my full name and address in order to have access to them. Uh, thanks, but no thanks.

(Word to the wise among my fellow web development folk: stop throwing up barriers to access. You’re losing sales and viewers for every piece of information you ask for that is not 100% vital to delivering the basic service they’re trying to get to.)

Adding to the discrepancy and the difficulty in finding correct information is the fact that the hardiness zones are in the process of being changed. You can thank global warming for that. The zones have migrated northward and continue to do so.

Given the difficulty with different drawings of the map being different (which hasn’t changed since 1990 so I’m not sure what gives there…), I settled on the USDA’s Zone Hardiness Map. I find it hard to read but at least the zones themselves are defined in a text table under the close-up state map.

The USDA says I live in Zone 9b. That means that in the winter it gets down to 25°-30°, which I got a chilly taste of this weekend when we actually had snow forecast!

But around here, figuring out the overall zone is not the only thing you have to take into account. With the bay and the hills and the mountains, you can walk two or three blocks and go from 40° grey with fog cover to 70° sunny cloudless skies. These pockets of differing weather are known as “micro-climates”.

What’s my micro-climate?

I found a really interesting “current conditions and forecast” map of the Bay Area. It projects the expected temperature, windspeed, soil temperature, etc. I expect I’ll make good use of that, but it doesn’t really help me to understand the micro-climate I’ve moved into.

I’ve spent a few hours at this point trying to find a microclimate map, and so far the closest I’ve come is the map in the previous paragraph. Very helpful in planning if I need to cover the flowers against frost, but not so useful in year-long planning.

I’ll continue researching. More information on this when I find it. And if I can’t find it directly, I may just have to compile that information for this area here. Every gardener deserves access to information on it.

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Plant 1/4″ deep, 12″ apart
Sprouts in 8-10 days
Matures in 55 days
row space: 24″
warm sunny location
rich soil, keep moist but not waterlogged
trim back entire plant to 4″ when it begins flowering.

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purple flowers in late spring.

Sow anytime in mild climates and mid-spring in cold areas.

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Full Sun away from wind

Don’t plant near fennel (affects the flavor of both)

sow mid-spring in cold areas or anytime in warm climates.

Germinate in 10-20 days

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