About Bay Gardener

Hi, I'm Ryan. I've been gardening in the San Francisco Bay Area for seven years. I love growing tomatoes and exploring the many different varieties, but I've been constantly frustrated by how different the growing conditions are across the Bay Area and how hard it is to find advice tuned to my specific neighborhood.

Generic planting guides treat the entire region as one climate. They aren't. A backyard in the Sunset District gets blanketed in summer fog while one in Walnut Creek bakes in 100°F heat. The same tomato variety that thrives in one place will struggle a few miles away.

As a data scientist, I went looking for better answers. I found high-resolution climate, fog, solar, and soil datasets that most gardening apps ignore. Fed into crop performance models, these data paint a detailed, block-by-block picture of what will actually grow well where you live.

Now I'm building Bay Gardener to put that picture in your hands. The app combines quantitative recommendations from those models with qualitative knowledge from the local growing community to give you personalized planting guides for every crop, tuned to your neighborhood.

Subscribe for updates to learn more and be one of the first to use it when we launch.

Have a question, spotted an error, or want to share your garden? Email me at ryan@baygardener.com.