Breakfast with Karl

The view from the upstairs porch.
Don't worry: it will burn off by 11 a.m.

    Karl is finally back, after being absent for nearly three weeks. We don't see a lot of Karl at this time of year, so waking up to gray skies and higher humidity was a lovely surprise. Karl is the fog.
    The Bay Area gets a lot of fog, primarily due to our geography and physics. Put a large pool of cold water (the Pacific Ocean) next to a warm surface (California), then gently blow air across the top of the water and the water vapor will condense to the point it can be seen. The fog starts to form off the California coast in the afternoon, streams in through the Golden Gate around sunset, and by the following morning, the Bay is shrouded in gray, tourists are shivering, and everyone is dressed in layers that are shed as the fog burns off. Everybody talks about the fog: "May Gray," "June Gloom," "Fogust," "fog days of summer," and even "fogpocalypse" are names given to the weather conditions. We're miles away from the Pacific Ocean, but blocks from another large pool of cold water (San Francisco Bay), so Karl usually joins us for breakfast.
    Why "Karl"? The 2003 movie Big Fish and Twitter.
    According to local news sources, in August 2010, a parody account named "@KarltheFog" popped up on Twitter, and began posting humorous comments about the fog and low clouds and the effect on planned events. (We complain about the fog, but don't let it get in the way of doing things.) The name "Karl" came from a character in the film: a giant who was terrorizing a town until someone realized that he was simply hungry and lonely. The creator of the account felt the fog was, like Karl, misunderstood, and set up the account with the comment, "All that is sunny does not glitter, not all those in the fog are lost."
    Anthropomorphizing the local weather condition changed attitudes toward it. The @KarltheFog Twitter account has, as of this date, 365,000 followers, and more than 20,000 likes. Karl has been a Jeopardy clue, and appears in a popular TV commercial promoting the beauty of California. San Francisco even has a "Fog Appreciation Day" food truck gathering to kick off "Fogust." And locals have gone from complaining to simply shrugging it off--when shivering tourists ask if summer is always so cold and gray, locals simply answer, "Oh, that's just Karl," before pointing them to the closest shop for a fleece hoodie embroidered with the Golden Gate Bridge.

Flax Farming

    One of the slightly odd things about coastal California is that we have two, nearly similar, growing seasons. One is the traditional growing season, when seeds or plants go into the ground in the spring, grow through the summer, and are harvested in the fall. Our days are warm, our nights are (mostly) cool, and if there's enough water, the harvest is good.

    But coastal California has a second growing season. This one starts in October or November, when the days are still warm, and the nights aren't quite below freezing. It ends in mid- to late April, just about the time it's warm enough to plant tomatoes. This growing season features cooler days, and colder nights, and...rain. Get the seeds into the ground early enough, keep them moist enough to germinate, and then--in most years--Mother Nature can take over the irrigation schedule.

    I went to a couple presentations on growing flax given by Chico Flax last month. Flax is a near-perfect winter crop for California: plant it in the fall, give it a little water to start, then simply let it grow. Flax loves cool weather, doesn't mind freezing nights, and is ready for harvesting about the time everything is warming up in spring. I've wanted to try growing my own flax, so I bought some Linum usitatissimum 'Suzanne' seeds with the goal of producing a tiny crop of my own.

    Yesterday was flax planting day. The garden itself is rather a mess: I've been away the past couple of years during the prime periods for working in the garden, so very little beyond the perennial bed in front of the house has been cared for, and my herb garden is mostly dead. However, this time of year is perfect for garden clean-up, transplanting, and generally reorganizing the garden. There are two tiny raised beds at the foot of the back garden: those beds are the only places that gets full sun all day (a requirement for flax), and won't be planted with vegetables until the spring, so the flax goes there. The soil is "ok"--the beds have lain fallow for two years, and have never been exposed to any chemicals--so there wasn't a lot of prep work needed, other than a good soaking to moisten the soil. Once moist, I simply dragged my fingers through the soil to create some shallow furrows, then broadcast the seeds over everything. After evening out the soil to cover the seeds, I pressed the soil down a little bit to make sure the seeds were in contact with it, then gave everything a good misting. According to Chico Flax, the seeds should germinate within 7-10 days. 

    Now, about that madder bed...