If you garden in Santa Cruz, Capitola, Aptos along the water, or out toward Davenport, the fog belt is about the best place in the county to grow sugar snap peas. The cool, mild, drawn-out season is exactly what they want.

If you garden in the county's warm thermal belt above the fog, the feijoa, or pineapple guava, is an easy, dependable fruit that fits right in. It does not need the Banana Belt's warmth the way citrus or avocado does, but it crops happily here and earns its place as an evergreen

In the county's warm sunny pocket above the fog, strawberries ripen faster and sweeter than down on the coast. The trade-off is heat: water carefully, mulch well, and tend the bed in the afternoon and these berries are a joy.

A local guide to community gardens in Santa Cruz County, from Beach Flats to Watsonville. How to find a plot, apply, handle waitlists, and what to do while you wait.

If you garden in the San Lorenzo Valley, in the shaded canyons and redwood-lined creek bottoms around Felton, Ben Lomond, and Boulder Creek, a Eureka or Lisbon lemon is a marginal proposition. This is the coldest, shadiest part of the county for citrus, and a true acid lemon, whi

If you garden in Watsonville, Corralitos, or the south-county flats and benches of the Pajaro Valley, you are in the county's warmest, earliest microclimate, and bush beans love it. Blue Lake snap beans will be among the first and most productive crops in your summer garden, on the county's famously