Alameda is in the East Bay, but SF is not far away. In the East Bay, is the Berkeley Botanical Garden. In January it will be cool (upper 50's to low 60's. In San Francisco the Stribing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park (9th Ave. and Lincoln Way) is a must--great plants, many sub-tropical, and a beautiful garden. Nearby there are lots of great places to eat or have tea on 9th ave. Also in GG park is the history Conservatory Of Flowers--tropical plants as well as the 19th century architecture of the building itself. GG park itself is also worth driving around--so many neat little hidden meadows ponds and lakes. South of SF on the coast is Half Moon Bay. I am over there all the time. I like to visit Half Moon Bay Nursery--it has a nice greenhouse area of houseplants as well as another greenhouse full of succulents. A nice inexpensive seafood restaurant at the Marina is Ketch Joanne. HMB is very pretty with farms, huge commercial greenhouses and open space making for a good way to visit the Pacific Ocean. Downtown HMB is full of nice shops full of high end art and crafts. My housemate Charles has a shop next to a grove of gigantic rust metal dinosaurs. Our neighbor, who has the dinosaurs, has a great outdoor gardening sculpture and pottery business, but what would you do with a 300 lb fountain? He rarely sells the dinosaurs, because they are so huge; but they are a great stop for tourists with kids, and he just likes having them. He keeps adding more. People are always stopping to check them out and take pictures. Olive trees do well around here but there haven't been local commercial groves for many years. There may be some to the north near Sonoma, another very picturesque town with historic buildings and shops. Alicia might know. A junior college (Canada College) near me is built on land that once was an olive grove. There are many old trees, growing wild, up and down the hillside and in a seldom visited little canyon. I get olive seedlings coming up in my yard all the time as the birds drop the seeds. Jon

sng: I like the way you research. Do a copy and paste for -- Callistemon phoeniceus -- and you will find considerable info on the web via Google. I have a feeling you've misspelled it somehow. It's a shrub to about ten to fifteen feet, easily trained into a "standard" or multi-trunked "tree". "Escallonia x exoniensis ÂBalfouriÂ, E. laevis, E. rubra ESCALLONIA We excluded Escallonia for making the following assumptions:" Your assumptions are inaccurate. The common Escallonias are almost always trimmed into tight hedgelike masses; hence making it hard to see the potential as a small tree. Along the coast, especially, the listed ones (not so common) make great multi-trunk small trees. -Melaleuca armillaris BRACELET MYRTLE -Melaleuca ericifolia HEATH MELALEUCA "I have probably seen these plants somewhere but do not remember if they are dense enough for our purpose. I will try finding them in our neighborhood and do more research." Although these species have fine-textured foliage, they do grow into densely-foliaged small trees. I'm attaching a photo of one (they look alike). -Metrosideros collinus ÂSpringfire NEW ZEALAND CHRISTMAS TREE "I always liked this tree but never knew the name. The street I take every day to work is dressed with this tree on both sides and they are quite tall, probably 20-30 feet (may be M. excelsus?)." The "trees" you see are M. excelsus and they get bigger than 30 feet. M. collinus is smaller. And conseuqently slower growing. -Pittosporum crassifolium KARO "I see this planted practically everywhere I go. (Maybe because I live near ocean and work near SF bay?) SF Botanical Garden uses it to screen chain link fences and it does the job so well. I really love the slivery blue green foliage of this plant that goes beautifully with the deep maroon color of its flower. Urban Forest Ecosystems Institute marked all PittosporumÂs health hazard as allergy, except for P. tenuifolium that was marked as unknown. I had no way of telling likelihood of causing allergy but did not want to take any risk so dropped all Pittosporum from my list except for P. tenuifolium. But now I have a further reference on this so I will definitely reconsider P. crassifolium. Thank you again." There are over 160 species of Pittosporum. I doubt that all of them are allergenic. The two most common ones (P. undulatum and P. tobira) are highly fragrant and, because of that, highly allergenic to many people. P. crassifolium is not significantly fragrant (as with P. ten.). Joe Here is a link that might be useful: Melaleuca ericifolia

i live on the side of mt davidson a mile from west portal so that's my micro climate area usually foggy after 4th of july,i grow peapods kale collards garlic potatoes beets and bush beans if i can keep them warm, zuchinni, tomatoes only by trial and error, last year was a disaster, all the plants rotted with small green tomatoes on them , was it blight or just too foggy, don't know. this year i have the tomato plants covered with agri cloth, this is the first time trying the agricloth maybe it will keep it warmer. i also start my tomato plants from seeds. i just save the seeds from a good farmers market tomatoes and plant them the following year for bees and hummingbirds, i have fushias and lavender plants, to help pollinate 2 apple trees, also have meyers lemon tree, a lime tree in a pot and bay laurel in a pot. city college has two plant sales a year and i got the bay laurel there great to have fresh bay leaves for cooking. i have herbs too fresh oregano, thyme, french tarragon, flat leaf parsley and trying to get cilantro seeds to germinate. also scallions. i hope this gives you some ideas of what you can grow here in SF. good luck on the tomatoes this year. and now we finally have rain,

I moved here from Chicago (and have also lived in LA) and you really, really should rent first. Housing prices are not going to zoom up anytime soon. The banks have a large shadow inventory and CA is one of the three worst states for foreclosures. It is very time-consuming to buy a foreclosure. Figure it will take 4x longer than to buy normally. Homes in foreclosure are often in bad shape; quality of construction in CA is often very low. Labor costs are high and skillful workers harder to find than they should be. Do not assume you can remodel a not-so-perfect house into what you want. The NIMBY-ism here is hideous and in all the major cities it is extraordinarily difficult and expensive to enlarge a home's footprint. You are legally constrained from covering more than 40% of your lot anyway, I believe, and with our small lots that's not a big footprint. Permits are expensive to obtain and if you make structural changes, it will be required that you bring everything up to current building code. Since every year brings in stricter earthquake building codes, this can add so much to the cost that remodeling projects become impossible. For example, our neighbor wanted to turn their downstairs into a legal in-law: adding a second bathroom, building a single-story, one-room addition. They had $75K in cash as their budget (we live in the Oakland foothills, nice older area, starter homes). It took them over $12K and almost two years to go through the permit process. Eventually they were told they had to apply for a waiver because they were taking 2' from the single-car garage which was already minimum size allowed, so they had to have the architect re-draw the plans and resubmit them. Permit cost, BTW, is 10% of the cost estimate in our city. The City of Oakland does the engineering study for all projects. As we live on a hill (great east-facing hillside views), they were told to stabilize their lot, it would be necessary to sink 40 piers, each 37' deep to bedrock, filled with steel rebar and concrete. 25 of the piers would be for the single-room addition (which was only going to be about 17x25') and the remaining 15 would be placed all along the north side of the existing house. The cost for the pier work alone? $65,000. Needless to say, they did something else with their remaining $63K. You might be surprised what you pay for utilities here. PG&E is one of the most expensive utilities in the country, and most older homes aren't insulated well. Our home is insulated with double-pane windows, we live in a warmer microclimate than Berkeley, I keep my home fairly cool, yet we pay on average $170/mo for gas (furnace/dryer/stove) and electricity. No one can place any dependency on PG&E absorbing all the costs for their unmapped leaking gas mains (a neighborhood in San Bruno saw its gas main blow up and 8 people died); we ratepayers will almost certainly see our rates rise yet again. Water isn't that expensive, but earthquake-proofing our EBMUD water reservoirs is. Our bi-monthly water bill for a large garden (1/6 acre) and 3 people runs $45 for water and $100 for earthquake work. We do have earthquake insurance. There is a fault that runs right through Alameda County and it's overdue for another major quake. Homeowners insurance is fairly low - less than $1K, and umbrella liability is around $200/yr. Earthquake insurance with a $100K deductible costs us almost $4000/yr. However, we have no mortgage so we are carrying all the risk on our home. It made sense for us to purchase risk mitigation. To be afraid of all of Oakland is ridiculous. There are some very good neighborhoods here, just as there are some bad neighborhoods in Berkeley. If I were buying for the first time, I'd look in El Cerrito on the east side of San Pablo Ave. Good, stable neighborhoods, nice weather, easier city traffic, great services/shops. I like Alameda, but access is limited to the bridges, and traffic is easily snarled at commute times. Traffic is the huge issue in the Bay Area. If you are still working, you need to really see how the traffic patterns work, not just when things go right but when things go wrong. Public transit is pathetic compared to Chicago, NY and Boston. Cars are a necessity in the East Bay; you can get around without one but it will take forever and making transfers between systems is a pain. Don't ignore the sales tax. The first time you pay sales tax on a new car, you will definitely feel the pain! Food is a conundrum: you can spend less and get higher quality, but on average Bay Area residents eat out more often than anyone else except New Yorkers, over 4x/week. I don't mean to sound discouraging. We love living here but there is no denying CA is an extremely expensive state. State income taxes are high and services are dwindling. You will find politics very different here than back East.