Stan, Don't believe everything you see on television, especially with regard to average winter temps in Capetown and the Cape of Good Hope. They can and do get some frost there occasionally, as they have varied microclimates due to elevation and topography. wind is also much more a factor there, and weather is very inconsistent on a day to day basis as they do get cold fronts off the Antarctic as well as the Atlantic. From my observations of what is growing well in Capetown, I would say the climate is most similar to San Diego in general, but with more winter rains, and 80F is not a typical long term average daily high in winter there. I visited over a 6 week period in the Western Cape in August/September, and the weather was very much like what we get here in the SF Bay Area in mid to late spring. You needed a jacket on many days, there was typically driving windy days alternating with warmer ones, and there was snow on the mountains in back of Capetown above 5000 foot elevation, although it didn't last for more than a week at a time. Even the subtropical parts of coastal eastern South Africa can also get the occasional frost, and has, so don't believe that it never gets down to freezing along the coast from perhaps Port Elizabeth west to Capetown. As you get to Durban and points east/north, it is distinctly subtropical with no frost, unless you get inland and up into the mountains. Not really safe to generalize about South Africa unless you live there or look up the climate records... And Capetown does get their local equivalent of Santa Ana winds which result from compressed, heated air descending from the interior mountainous plateau when they get offshore wind conditions. The hot drying winds or the cold onshore winds can be really hard on gardens in Capetown, and large leafed tropicals that need lots of water fair poorly there in such events, and water is costly to provide.

Following up a few months later... The experiment with perennial tomatoes did not work out. They pretty much shut down after the pruning. Still, home-grown tomatoes at Christmas is pretty cool. This year, I cut way back on the number of plants in the greenhouse, from six tomato plants to two, and it's much more manageable. I've also tried to layer the plants in the greenhouse bed: Strawberries on the bottom, peppers in the middle, and tomatoes up high. This does not work well. The tomatoes and peppers have very deep roots. Strawberries are shallow rooted, so you wind up either overwatering the tomatoes or underwatering the strawbs. And even though you get strawberries a month before you'd get them outside, there's no point in having strawberries in the greenhouse when you have perfect strawberry weather outside. Next, maybe carrots and beets for the lower stratum. The peppers I planted are the Spanish Padron, which have become very popular. They have a reputation as having variable degrees of spiciness ("unos pican, otros no"). The deal with these guys is that they're quite hot *once they're mature enough to set seed*. So...if you're going to grow these guys...harvest early. They're best when they're tiny.

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.

boy i'll second that, jeffinmonterey. we waited over 6 months for our city to approve our plans and grant us the honor of a permit. they also put us into the design review fasttrack (which dinged us 1800 bucks) all because they couldn't visualize and, ostensibly, are biased against modern design. need to keep the mayberry aesthetic up you know. luckily our architect really pushed us into doing a model early on so when we plunked that down on the table during the design review meeting, the two bluehairs looked back and forth between their bi-focals and said "you know, this doesn't look anything like your drawings." they were wrong, though, it did. anyway, sorry for the rant. we interviewed 4 architects. three i found on the AIASF website and one was a friend of a friend who is a one woman operation in the city. we wound up going with her because we liked her vision and her personality. all four architects came to our house to scope things out and wound up staying between 1 to 2 hours. we did pay a retainer to get things going with the one we chose. she works on a percentage basis, 12% - 15% of the finished price tag. we never felt completely comfortable with that so we agreed to pass the baton after her initial drawings were complete. they were actually very detailed. my husband and i felt we didn't need so much hand holding through to the end and we have brought her in to tweak some things along the way. for that we pay her an hourly fee. we have had some stumbling points when things moved from her to the contractor's draftsman but our contractor is great at working these things out as we progress. it's been about 5 weeks since they kicked us out to start and the framers are really buzzing along. so far i'm quite happy. i'll happily pass on names and numbers if you'd like to contact me directly.