The best rootstock is Lovell. If you want more than one variety and you don't have a lot of space, I'd recommend you get a three-in-one or five-in-one peach. Those you can typically pre-order from Dave Wilson, and you'd want to do it now. Our nursery here in Santa Cruz doesn't charge extra, it's $19.99 no matter what, but the multiple grafted peaches are more. Citation is better if you want to plant several varieties together, they will stay small enough and not compete, but they will also use more water. I know, lots of choices, my personal recommendation would be to get a single variety peach on lovell, and then find someone from the CRFG who'd be willing to graft additional varieties onto your tree. Carla in Sacramento heard the same thing I did: Baby crawford is supposed to be one of the best, I was looking for that one last Winter, now I just plan on grafting it. Babock is not a good choice if you want something with a bit of a tang in it. Most white peaches are sweet and less acid. White nectarines have more acidity, and yellow peaches have yet more acidity, followed by yellow nectarines, and finally, red fleshed peaches which have the most acidity. Snow beauty peach is truly an amazing peach, it's much more flavored and sweeter and juicier than babock. Dave wilson says this about it: Snow Beauty White-fleshed taste test winner: one of the all time highest-scoring varieties in blind fruit tastings at Dave Wilson Nursery. Low acid, high sugar, tantalizing flavor. Large, very firm, attractive red skin. Harvest early to mid-July in Central California. Tested as 96.5GF330. Estimated chilling requirement 750-850 hours. Self-fruitful. Pat. No. 10175. (Zaiger)

Berkeley has a rose garden kind of up in the hills on Euclid Avenue. They won't have many of your roses, but they'll have some. I think Oakland also has some rose gardens, but I haven't been to them. The rose garden in GG park may not be blooming much right now, since it's been so cool. That garden usually doesn't have much bloom, since SFO is so cool. The Russian River Rose Co. in Healdsburg has most of your roses. They're only open by appointment in summer, but they're usually open again for weekends in October. They've got a lovely rose allee that goes into the vineyards & offers a great view of the hills - I love that place! I agree w/ Elise - you'll enjoy Garden Valley Ranch in Petaluma. Filoli is also wonderful, and there's a museum in Palo Alto that has English roses, but I haven't been there. If you're interested in a trek, you could explore the Sacramento Historic City Cemetery. It's a lovely place, with antique & found roses, masoleums, etc. For me, Fair Bianca is a small shrub - I didn't know it could be a climber. It has that classic english diaper pail fragrance :) (I'm not exactly sure why Austin has so many roses w/ that fragrance!) Mme Issac Perriere (not sure about spelling) has one of the strongest rose fragrances & grows well for me in zone 9. She can be a pillar or climber & she's rarely out of bloom for me. Mme Alfred is another great! Good luck!

As far as water hardness, it depends where in the Bay area you live. If you are in San Francisco or south til about Palo Alto, your water mainly comes from Hetch Hetchy and is pretty pure and soft. If you're just south of there like me or beyond including San Jose and Silicon Valley, much of your water can come from groundwater sources and is pretty hard. I just put in a water softener last week - they seem uncommon for this area even though water can be fairly hard, but I learned about them visiting my parents in Las Vegas where the water is very hard. With zero hardness I may even try doing without rinse aid altogether. Our friends were admiring one family's brand new Miele from a just-completed kitchen remodel. One couple with a Bosch weren't happy with the (lack of) condensing drying on their plastics, and admired that the new Miele pops open the door automatically to help with the air drying. So amongst our friends, two happy Miele owners and one somewhat dissatisfied Bosch owner. For ourselves, unfortunately we had a top-end Maytag carried over from before our own remodel - it is a fairly mediocre performer but just refuses to die (even when it was left in the yard for a year during the remodel). I do hope it does die prematurely, admittedly it mostly works OK as long as I clean out the holes in the spray arms from accumulated gunk about once a year.

UPDATE: I took you at your word(s) and looked around for a fabricator with a good reputation locally. Not far from us there is a place which gets quite positive reviews. I was in several times talking to them and checking the place out, took DH over, and we decided we would have them do the work. Meanwhile, in addition to the kitchen, we needed a remnant for a dresser in the bedroom. We saw a piece in their remnant pile we liked well enough and they put our name on it. The oddest thing happened, that piece just mysteriously got 14" shorter after another customer needed a piece for a BBQ. Imagine that. There were several phone calls, each with a different story, none of which sounded particularly credible. Bottom line: "our" piece was now too short for our job. We decided to look further afield as a remnant is one thing, but it would be a whole other story if something happened to the actual stones we'd be choosing for the kitchen. There are some of those stories related here on GW, all very sad. The upshot was that we found North Coast Tile and Stone in Santa Rosa. They do have the tech, but are rather new to it. They also carry a nice selection of stones on site, although there are a zillion more to be seen at their supplier in (guess where?!) Hayward. Here is one of the reasons I'm so fond of tech: We needed one seam, but the two pieces to be connected by that seam needed to come out of 2 different slabs. The stone we loved has a lot of movement, so this was going to be tricky. The tech allows you to scootch two rectangles around on-screen, one on one slab and the other on the other slab until you find a nice match for the seam - no guessing and hoping. The screen image shows them butting together just as they will when installed. Having found the match, the coordinates are recorded in the program so the cutting machine knows exactly where to cut to get that match. This is our seam, can you find it? The left end of the chopstick is pointing at the seam:Interesting aside: Evidently almost nobody treks up to their fabrication facility in Windsor to discuss their templates. I think we were the first to ever come up and hang over their new program and weigh in on that seam. The fabricator we worked with was a very talented guy in general and loves stone. He takes his favorite remnants home to love them more if they sit unclaimed for long enough, which kind of made the installers good-humoredly roll their eyes. I have visions of a stone garden at his house. :-) We took one of his favorites for the dresser in the bedroom. Now we can go hunting for the perfect backsplash!