Hi, gang. I want to introduce you to a handy little online tool: http://weather.com/outlook/travel/… This is weather.com's vacation planning tool. It allows you to compare the climates of any two cities. You can look at average maximum and minimum temps and monthly rainfall. This turns out to be very useful for comparing the growing conditions in different parts of the world. A couple of examples of what I learned: --Los Angeles, CA and Perth, Australia have almost identical temperature profiles (offset by six months). But Perth gets a lot more rain in winter, and even its summers average half an inch (1.3 cm) of rain a month. In contrast, LA has five months in summer that average less than 0.3 inches (0.75cm) of rain per month. --Valparaiso, Chile is an eerily close match for San Francisco, CA. San Francisco is a little bit wetter. --I think there are two different types of Mediterranean climate areas. What I'll call "Moist Mediterranean" includes South Africa, Western and South Australia, and southern France/Italy/Greece. They all get a bit of summer rainfall. "Dry Mediterranean" includes California, Chile, and parts of the Middle East (Beirut and Tel Aviv, for example). They all have long periods of virtually no rain in summer. The implication to me is that if I'm growing South African or Australian plants, I may need to give them a little bit of summer water. The tool isn't perfect -- not all cities are covered, and many of them don't have temperature data. But this is the best online tool I've found for comparing basic climate details. Mike San Jose, CA