i was born and raised in fresno..have memories of driving and walking in the pea soup fog..driving was pretty scary..you couldn't see anything in front of you..as for gardening..my parents never had a problem..i grew up and moved to the desert in sunny california..must say i don't miss the fog one bit..love waking up to sunshine..

Eating chocolate and going shopping LOL

Carla in Sac

I was born and raised in Sacramento, and still live in the Sacramento Valley. We've definitely been having our fair share of pea soup lately, and it's been a pain to drive through. All you can do is stare really hard at the white line of paint on the road, because that's all you can see in front of you.

However, I can't tell whether the fog has affected my garden in any way. I've only started gardening this year, so I'm not sure what sort of effect to look for. My Hibiscus lasiocarpus is wishing the water would fall out of the sky as rain instead of just hanging there as fog, but the other plants seem happy enough, and I just watered the Hibiscus.

We've had fog everyday since Nov. 30... sometimes it doesn't even lift in the afternoon. We happen to live above the normal "fog line", but we've had fog almost every morning and again at night. The other night we decided to drive into town to run some errands and have supper out. We went about a mile and came to a wall of heavy fog and decided that the danger of driving was too great for what we had to do, and so turned the car around and went home. I've done this before -- left home in glorious sunshine and met with dense fog further on and turned around and came back home. I, personally, like lots of sunshine.

I live in Fresno and these overcast days are really depressing to me. I probably have the S.A.D sydrome, really. However, we have yet to have our first frost and my brugmansia are still in full bloom. They are a sight to behold!

From the time I was a kid my parents talked of the fog like midwesterners of tornados. I know my mom said her knee's would shake driven through it to see relatives in Madera. My father just didnt say much about it other than he hated it-because he did the driving!.
I thought our bay area ground fog at its worst wasnt too bad-nothing to worry about."Gee,its foggy" kind of thing...but now that I've seen Tule fog,whoa. Non Californians don't realize what fog is until they have been in that.
I think I had a bit of that shake when a beemer almost plowed into me last week. A grey car in grey fog-I never got a chance to swirve-just luck I'm here-and He wasnt shoved off the highway too down below..He merged,full speed,without looking...
Time to go smell a flower,give thanks-lol...

Driving on Highway One in summer fog on the higher ridges where it is really dense can be just as dangerous and difficult to see, so it isn't just the valleys, although pea soup fog and no sun for weeks at a time does get old fast, I remember lots of such winter weather back in college at UC Davis. The amazing thing to me was that you could go up to the 6th floor of the taller buildings and be completely above it, in brilliant sunshine. Tule fog does tend to keep the freezing temperatures at bay, and probably doesn't bother the plants one bit. Worst fog driving I have ever experienced is the typical daily fogs that form in the highlands of Mexico on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico coastal plain. It comes in like clockwork every afternoon before dusk, and on those twisting narrow mountain roads full of trucks and buses, it is much more dangerous driving than California freeways!

I love a couple of days of fog, but weeks on end of enless, non-lifting fog is too much. I makes you gloomy and you don't feel like going outside. Today was clear and sunny though! my dogs are laying out on the brick-paved patio soaking up the sun. Some of my plants are actually loving the extra moisture in the air though (cloudforest plants). Brugmansias, cymbidiums, cyathea cooperi, blechnum gibbum and tecoma stans are in their prime right now. Here are a couple of pics from my yard (sorry for the poor quality, they were taken with a phone).

Brugmansia and Tecoma Stans
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Again
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And mina Lobata - don't know why the picture is showing up sideways.
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Not a valley person, but I have some fog tales of my own. Most memorable was driving most of the way up Hwy 5 from LA to Sacramento in the pea soup. It was pretty darn scary, to be honest, but the lack of distractions helped me to keep my eyes focused for the sight of lights ahead.

Snow/ice is what causes me to stop breathing, fog I can handle (but not necessarily the other drivers who are the real danger.)

We have had more fog here on the North coast this year than I can recall other years, but it generally burns off by afternoon. We had a pretty good frost in October, but since then nothing has been "burned" and it is much warmer than usual, too. The garlic doesn't seem to mind the fog.

I assume the tule fog is really only bad for a very short time period in the winter though, since it's also the rainy season and the fog forms during dry weather periods. So it must be fairly sporadic? Still, you all get about ten months of sunshine in the central valley, so there's nothing to complain about. At least the fog is in winter, not summer, like along the CA coastline.

I do remember one year, I think it was Dec 1986, that we had really bad tule fog creep into the Bay Area inland valleys where I grew up (Walnut Creek/Concord) for a record 20 days or so. It was about 40 degrees day and night, never changing, never seeing the sun. But we drove up to Mt. Diablo on Christmas eve with the family, and it was like 70 degrees up there in the sunshine above the fog, which was only 20 minutes from our house. That was pretty weird.

Kerrican, the tule fog is almost continuous from about December 1 to March 1. It goes away during actual rainstorms, but it comes back in less than a week. Sometimes it goes away for a few days in warm weather, too, but more often than not, it's there. Not always so dense as to make driving difficult, but often it is.