For those of you who live in the fog belt along the coast of California, you know it’s a completely different climate from inland California. So much of the common gardening advice doesn’t work here or doesn’t apply to this climate.
For example, I planted 4 tomato plants this year. The one that is doing best is the one growing in the shaded spot. The ones in more sun have been decimated by fungus. I believe it is because we have fog, fog, fog and more fog, then the sun comes out for about 3 hours and is blazing hot with the intensity of a beam of light coming through a magnifying glass. I don’t think the tomato plants can adjust to the abrupt temperature changes. That’s my theory, at least.
Anyway, I hope more of you California gardeners who live in this region will join in this thread. I feel like we are under-represented here, LOL.
I’m 5-7 miles from the Coast, I can feel the breeze on most days. My previous garden was closer to the coast and I had better yield than this garden. My tomatoes are doing well, I have mildew on my cucumber and zucchini plants though.
I do not have the winter snow of McKinleyville, the thick fog of Point Reyes, the cool winter temperatures of Monterey Bay, the warmer Spring of Cayucas, nor the intense summer of the Los Angeles county coast, but I do have marine layer from late Fall through mid-summer punctuated by short 3-5 day periods of 80° clear-sky weather in Dec. through Feb.
Foggy Point Reyes here, though we do get much more sun (and wind) here in Point Reyes Station than the folks across Tomales Bay in Inverness and out on the Point. Great for apples and plums, tougher for peaches (and tomatoes), very tough for apricots. It’s been unusually cool here this summer, so far.
In Bonsal and further up-river in Pala / Valley Center there has been a gradual conversion to Dragon Fruit, Pomegranate, and other crops with lower water requirements.
Fallbrook is often thought of as “avocado central” due to the packing house established there on Hwy 395 prior to the construction of I-15. But Fallbrook itself has seen a large drop in avocado acreage due to fire, water costs, and demand for housing. The same is true in Rainbow, Vista, and Oceanside (Morro Hills). Meanwhile out in De Luz not much has changed due to long established water rights.
@jerry, the peach ‘Red Baron’ has performed really well for me in this climate. It didn’t even have PLC this spring, and that’s without spraying. The peaches are ripe right now, and I have been picking them every day for over a week.
Thanks for the tip. I’ve tried a number of varieties (though not that one) here, and due to PLC and rots, the only ones that have thrived unsprayed so far have been Black Boy and Indian Free. While they display a little curl early in the season, they’re mostly unaffected. Others have been crippled by it, and look terrible - which my wife, the native garden designer, doesn’t much appreciate in her demonstration garden.
In the 1990’s I owned property adjacent to the San Luis estuary. In eight years it increased 10x in value and I sold it. It’s now worth about 1.5x that.
It took my Red Baron a couple of years to get established, but once it did, it took off. Usually it does get a little bit of PLC which disappears as the season goes on. I was surprised it had none this year.
LOL, I have a friend who is really into native plants and is always trying to get me to “go native.” There are just too many kinds of plants I want to grow to confine myself to the few species that grow native in this rather barren area. Maybe if I lived in the Amazon Basin or SE Asia I could be happy limiting myself to native plants.
I get it, you get it, but they don’t. If they can plant native milkweed and save a few monarch butterflies, that makes them happy. Who am I to interfere? I just politely say “no” every time they tell me I should plant more natives.
@CA_Poppy
I tell them I have a dozen different truly native plants including both of the milkweeds along with over a dozen other perennials that attract bees and butterflies in 7 different dedicated planters interspersed among over 40 in-ground fruiting plants on a 1/4 acre. On any sunny day there is at least one monarch flitting about - if not several. At that point they never bring up the subject with me again.
