The Cloudforest Gardener is a website site dedicated to the cultivation of rare fruits, vegetables and plants from the highlands of the Andes and other tropical highlands of the world. The site was born out of the need of finding good gardening information for the cool coastal regions of California. Our climate is often ignored in most gardening books and websites which generally cater either to the continental, cold-winter type climate, or to tropical or semi-tropical climates more typical of the Southeastern Untied States.

Is the Cloudforest a commercial site?

No, this website is purely non-commercial. It is a culmination of my interests in cornucopia gardening and exotic far-away lands, and my professional background as a software developer and website architect. Because of that, it is not likely to become a commecial site. This site honors the old days of the internet when Yahoo was still at yahoo.stanford.edu, Mosaic was the browser of choice, and .com domains were considered undesirable.

Who benefits from the Cloudforest?

People who would find this website useful include gardeners from all the cool climate regions of the world where winters are mild and summers are cool. This includes of course California, New Zealand, Southern parts of Australia, Tasmania, parts of England and scottland, and of course all tropical highlands. Even parts of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia qualify as cloudforest climates, albeit with a bit more frost than us folks further south. Others who might not have a green thumb but love exotic fruits and vegetables would also benefit from what will hopefully be a wide array of articles on the culinary delights of the food we grow.

Where is the Cloudforest located?

The Cloudforest Garden, e.g. the author's garden is located in the hills overlooking the city of Santa Cruz, and the Monterey Bay and Pacific Ocean to the South and West. The climate here is a typical, Sunset zone 16 thermal belt where frost is seen only occasionally, and (radiative) freezes in the lows in the mid to upper 20's can occur every 10-20 years. Living next to the earth's largest air conditioner (the Pacific) and the climactic whims of the Santa Cruz mountains does pose occasional challenges, but this is precicely what makes gardening interesting. We get it all here: earthquakes, downpours, landslides, fires, fog, wind, droughts, but the plants keep on growning.

How was the Cloudforest built?

I used a simple text editor to create the HTML, and used the latest best practices for web development to layout the site, including breadcrumbs, and an intuitive navigation design. Most of the graphics were designed using COREL and Paint Shop Pro. I've reduced the colors on as many graphics as possible to either 16 or 2 bit to speed up the download of the pages. The design is ideally suited to fit confortably in an 800x600 screen, but it is readable in a 640x480 environment without too much scrolling.

The Cloudforest runs 100% on UNIX. NT might be more user friendly, but it is not a very powerful and stable operating system whcih require frequent rebooting. The main advantage of NT and IIS is ASP. ASP is really a nice tool, but under UNIX, it is only available using Chilisoft's ASP interpreter. Soon, I will make sure that my pages also load well with LINUX' file manager, but for now, the pages are optimized for Explorer 5, and I am working on making them compatible with Netscape.

The interactive parts of the website are written in PERL 5. While some of the scripts were originally downloaded from the net, none really suited my needs without extensive modification before they did what I wanted. Most of the stuff will be migrated to JAVA once I can convince my Internet Provider to support JAVA servlets. I am con

Enjoy the site and most of all, have fun.

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