What Climate Zone am I In?

Q. I live in Santa Clarita, CA. up by Magic Mountain. I’ve always wondered exactly what “zone” this is considered??

A. Thanks for your wonderful email. It sounds as if you’ve got your priorities straight! By the way, the book you had in storage is 20 years old, but I am glad to hear how it helped you. (The second and much thicker edition, fully revised and updated, was published in year 2000. It is out of print, though you can still find used copies.) But now that you have morphed back into an avid gardener, why not look for a copy of my latest edition, “Pat Welsh’s Southern California Organic Gardening, Month-b-Month,” published January 2010? In this book I tell readers honestly and exactly how to how to choose, plant, prune, and grow everything from fruits and vegetables to ornamentals of all sorts throughout the year, while managing pests and diseases in safe ways, without resorting to poisonous pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. As I described in the opening chapter, I was in on the very beginning of organic gardening, but now I feel the time for organic gardening has really arrived!

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Regarding climate zones: Santa Clarita, Los Angeles County, is Sunset Zone 9. (For readers who may be new to the concept of plant climates, there are two systems of climate zones that help us to choose the appropriate plants for our gardens. The USDA Plant Hardiness Zones apply to the entire USA. These zones cover huge areas and thus are far less detailed and inclined not to work well here. I prefer the Sunset Climate Zones which are much more detailed and helpful in the West, and in California particularly, where our proximity to the Pacific Ocean combined with a highly varied topography produce a large number of significant variations in climate and thus a far greater number of distinctly different plant-climate zones than one might find in one of the central or eastern states of the USA.)

For a full description of Zone 9, see page 42 of the 2007 edition of Sunset Western Garden Book. Basically, Zone 9 is on of California’s thermal zones. Sometimes described as “thermal belts,” these areas occur on the sloping sides of hills and mountains and their main characteristic is that cold air drains off in winter and rising breezes keep them cooler in summer. Thus Zone 8, which is like a basin of land below, is likely to be colder in winter and warmer in summer. In winter, Zone 8 releases warm air upward and in a sense it “catches” the frosty temperatures that pour out of your zone into the zone below. This is lucky for you since you may be able to grow citrus and other plants that may freeze on the flat valley bottom below you. (Tule fogs are a characteristic of both Zone 8 and Zone 9. Stiff winter winds plague Zone 9, but many gardeners attempt to soften the winds by planting windbreaks.)

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Good luck with your garden and may it provide years of pleasure to you and your fine family. I am also blessed with a wonderful growing family. My garden is in a new easy-care, drought-resistant phase and also it is now becoming a destination for visits by great-grandchildren and neighbor children, who enjoy climbing the steps and running around on the paths and discovering the garden’s various “rooms” to play in. In this way children encounter the changing face of nature throughout the year and one hopes they get hooked on gardening for life.

All the best for Happy Organic Gardening!

Pat

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