To help you make sense of, and apply to your own yard, the experiences I relate in my “Yard Posts,” I’d like to paint a picture of my yard’s physical aspects: where my yard is located, how big it is, the type of soil underneath, the climate above, and so on.

I’ll add some social aspects of my yard that are important to keep in mind, too.

Where

I’m twenty miles from the ocean, as the crow flies, in San Diego County.

Elevation

The area is called Ramona, and it is up in the foothills, above and out of sight from the valley communities below of Poway, Scripps Ranch, Lakeside, Rancho Bernardo, and Escondido. My land is at about 1,450 feet in elevation.

Temperature and humidity

The marine layer of fog that forms over the ocean and rolls over the coastal land each evening during most months of the year runs into the hills that separate the Ramona bench from the valleys below, and often the marine layer is too shallow to push up into Ramona. In June, it can be sunny and 100 degrees at home, and I will drive down the hill to the beach to find it fogged in and barely 70 degrees.

Because my yard is hotter and drier than yards to the west and lower in elevation, I have almost zero powdery mildew on grapes, squash, tomatoes, and cucumbers. On the other hand, I frequently get sunburn on tomatoes, avocados, and apricots. Yards only a handful of miles west and down the hill get much more powdery mildew and much less sunburn than mine.

In the winter, my yard is relatively cold and wet too. The hills squeeze out a little more rain from the clouds onto our area. The elevation means that winter nights have more frost and more chill hours also. Almost every winter, my bananas, mangos, and avocados get some degree of cold damage. The coldest it has gotten in the past dozen years I’ve grown in this yard is 25 degrees. I’ve found only a few low-lying areas down the hill that get as cold at night as my place.

On the plus side, my fruit trees that like cold winters – apples, apricots, plums, pluots, peaches, nectarines, cherries, pears – have their winter chill requirements met easily in most years.

Size

The yard is 1.3 acres. This has been more than enough space to fulfill my goals of growing almost all (about 80 percent) of my family’s fruits and vegetables, plus chicken eggs, plus lots of extra avocados. I still leave approximately half of the property unirrigated and wild, covered with mostly native plants – oaks, sumacs, buckwheat, chamise.

(See “Keeping a corner wild” and “My yard, 10 years of growing”)

Slope

The land is on a gentle slope that faces the morning sun, east, but whose border reaches the top of the slope, such that there is no higher hill casting an afternoon shadow over it. Almost the entire acre gets full sun all day, all year long, except for a few spots near large oak trees.

Soil and stone

When my wife and I were looking for a house to buy in 2013, we arrived at this place and my wife entered the house to assess it. I walked the yard. I could live about anywhere as long as it had enough open space and good dirt. I scratched around and immediately knew that the soil was to my liking. It is a sandy loam, my favorite soil type. It’s so easy to dig and it also carries and holds some water and nutrients.

The soil is not a perfect and deep sandy loam throughout, however. Over the years as my plantings have expanded, I have discovered parts where the topsoil is thin (one shovel head in depth) and where there are numerous stones (watermelon down to fist size) hiding underneath.

There are also four groups of car-sized boulders. I have to carefully plant near these boulders because sometimes they are like tips of icebergs and their sides don’t go vertically into the dirt such that the dirt near them is only like a skin over their hidden bodies.

What is nice about these boulders is that they absorb and retain heat. This heat warms plants right next to the boulders throughout the night. I have noticed, for example, that B-type avocado trees make more fruit when planted next to the boulders.

(See “My soil, in depth”)

No hired help

I have built this yard and I maintain this yard almost entirely myself. I have no hired help. My wife helps weed some vegetable beds every now and then. My children are out in the yard with me every day, but mostly to eat what I grow. They’re only now getting old enough to provide some help rather than just good company.

I tell you this for two reasons.

One, I ain’t no phony. (Got that, Holden Caulfield?) I’m not talking about how you can plant all of this and grow all of that as I then have some guy do the work for me. In my twelve years growing this yard I have twice paid for help, and it was to have oak trees trimmed that were too tall for my skills and tools, and to have a giant patch of cactus removed.

I like doing all the work myself. It’s good for my body and it’s good for my mind. I also like the confidence it gives me as I share experiences in my Yard Posts.

Two, this yard is not so pretty. I can’t keep up with it at certain times of the year. Weeds grow longer than I’d like, cats poop in the bed I prepared for sowing carrots, rain falls before I get my lettuce seedlings planted, I’m late on an irrigation during a summer heatwave.

But I’ve seen a lot of other food gardens that aren’t perfect too. Maybe yours is like mine: only one or two people are caring for it, alongside all of the other obligations of life.

All of our yards have climate, soil, and other limitations, but within them we grow special food and gain special satisfaction.

Thank you for your support of my yard and my family through your helpful comments on my Yard Posts over the years. And I appreciate your support of my Yard Posts so I can keep them coming and ad-free.

All of my Yard Posts are listed here