My suggestion is that you rent before jumping in to buy. It is very likely the housing sales will not pick up until 2009 and this will give you the chance to look around carefully to decide what works best for you. Unlike Juno we ended up in the Oakland hills. We find the traffic on the 580 freeway faster and less clogged than any other EBay freeway, an important consideration when it can take you over an hour to go 35 miles at peak commute times. We live in an older neighborhood where lots are large, crime is moderate (lots of 'casual crime' but virtually no 'heavy' crime) but the mailman can leave pkgs on my front porch at any hour and no one takes anything. OTOH, it will cost you between $450K-$500K to buy a 2- or 3-bdrm older cottage in any reasonable shape. Our lot is 5600 sq. ft. with a small cottage - 2bd 2 ba with attached 1 car garage: Many Bay Area cities are under mandatory water rationing. You will need to learn an entirely new way of gardening with a wider variety of plants than you are accustomed to. I second the suggestion of EBMUD's 'Dry Climate' book, it's one of the finest available for our area. The Sunset magazine and garden books are also essential info sources. Consider resale carefully here. Some stay here forever, some move around a lot. Buying the wrong location can really hurt when you realize your house would be worth $100K more if it was located 2 miles away. Or that it takes you so long to hassle with the daily commute, you hardly have any time to garden at all!

luv_gardening___ont, we have found it's important to keep the green leaves off and to water very little during this time period. Like don't soak them at all, a half cup of water per gallon pot on a monthly bases if in a darken room. Less if you don't see them drying out between watering. I have allowed root bound pots less water if they are in in a cooler spot like the garage. You didn't mention how old this plant is and what variety. Wishing you the best of luck on your first wintering.

Some ponds are never cleaned and the ponds and its occupants survive very well. However, a large number of ponds are created with high fish densities or are built in locations were the pond receives a great deal of debris over the year. Even if you start out with just a few fish initially, in a healthy pond they will breed to the point that the number of fish will push the environmental limits of your pond and biofilter. The debris may be the result of leaves blowing into the pond, the die-back of vegetative pond plants as well as fish wastes. It is these latter types of conditions that will necessitate you cleaning the pond eventually. The two most likely time points for cleaning are in the fall, to reduce the amount of accumulated muck on the bottom of the pond as you head into winter, or in the spring to remove material accumulated over the winter from leaves blowing into the pond, accumulated fish waste or catkins and similar materials shed by trees as they leaf out. Cleaning in the fall reduces wastes in the bottom of the pond which may turn anaerobic if sufficient oxygen is not available, creating a breeding ground for harmful bacteria, or which may decompose, releasing ammonia and other dangerous chemicals that can be trapped under the ice. The build-up of these pollutants can lead to fish kills over the winter months. While keeping a hole in the ice over winter will help alleviate the accumulation of gases, cleaning the pond before winter sets in will reduce the overall potential for problems. Cleaning the pond in the spring may help reduce diseases and parasites that often occur as the pond and its biology warms up for the summer, as well as reduce the overall availability of nutrients that stimulate algae growth. The following are a few approaches that have been successfully used to clean the pond. 1. If the pond has a bottom drain periodic changes of water (typically 10% per week) have been used to evacuate the accumulated debris from the bottom of the pond. This simple approach minimizes the amount of material that is removed at any one time as well as adds water to the pond on a periodic basis. Care must be taken when adding water to be sure that you have minimized the addition of chlorine and chloramines typically present in many municipal water supplies. This can be done either by pre-treating the water with dechlorination agents or by using a whole-house water filter with an activated carbon cartridge. 2. Using a net such as used in swimming pools is helpful for cleaning out large materials that have settled to the bottom of the pond. However, if there is a very large amount of debris in the pond you should be careful to either remove the fish or use supplemental aeration to avoid creating significant oxygen deprivation due to stirring up anaerobic or large amounts of oxygen-consuming muck. If you notice a rotten egg smell this indicates the presence of hydrogen sulfide. You should immediately stop stirring up the bottom and get the fish out of the water as soon as possible before continuing with the cleaning. 3. You can use a variety of devices for vacuuming the bottom of the pond. Some of these use a garden hose to create a suction through a venturi device. The potential problem with these devices is that the pond may fill up with too much water during a prolonged vacuuming and you may have a potential problem of adding chlorine and chloramines to your pond if you do not pretreat the water. Wet/dry shop vacs, specially those with an attachment for a garden hose to provide a continuous drain, have also been used. These devices may drain a large amount of water from the pond in a short time and therefore it is necessary to either replace the water or use the garden hose to add the water back into the pond through the biofilter. Care must be exercised in reintroducing water taken from the bottom of the pond in that it may be depleted of oxygen as well as have very high suspended sediment levels that may create problems for the fish. A third approach is to use a pump capable of handling a moderate level of solids (such as a sump pump) to pull water from the bottom of the pond and pass it through a device to strain out the majority of the solids and then recirculate the water back into the pond. Filtering materials such as old sweaters, panty hose, etc. have all been used with some success in this approach. In any of these approaches, if using an electrically powered device running on house voltage make sure that you have it plugged into a GFI protected circuit for your own safety. Ronaye, Steve and David

I definitely need to go out and purchase some growing mix this weekend. Right now, I think my major concern is the flimsy-ness/poor roots of these plants. When I did my seeds last year (second set, lol) they were amazing! The color was great, the stems were hardy, and the roots were well developed, as well. This years batch just don't look that good. I'm thinking about just sucking it up and purchasing established seedlings from a local nursery. I suppose I was lazy with the startup of the plants and should have been more watchful of them from the start. Additionally, I used a poorer quality seed starting mix, which now I know has potentially backfired! Going to mull it over and think about it today and figure out what i'll do within the next few weeks. Thanks all for your advice/help!!