Hi,

Not sure if this is the right forum to post in or not. If another forum might be better, I'm open to suggestions!

By way of introduction, we just moved to Merced, CA to a new home with a large backyard. The backyard is surrounded by a 5' wood high fence. As we have 3 large dogs who I want to keep out of planned veggie gardens and away from the wood fence where they might get too "up close and personal" with neighboring dogs, we have an inner chain link fence enclosing an area about 40x 65 off the patio with lawn and a few trees for shade within the chain link for the dogs. I'm planning on raised bed gardens outside of the chain link.

We're on a corner lot with a street to one side that just dead ends at the back of our property line and gets no traffic. There's a sidewalk and then a strip of lawn about 10' wide and 85' long. Right now it's just a strip of lawn that gets watered and mowed each week and seems like a total waste of resources (esp. water!). The neighbors across the cul-de-sac (if that's an appropriate description of the dead-end) just have dirt on their side strip and, frankly, it doesn't look bad at all. For our strip, I'm thinking about putting down cardboard to kill the lawn and then in the spring possibly planting low maintence perennials like artichokes, fennel, and lavender along with some flowers. However, the strip of land is behind the 5' high fence on the north side of the property. Right now it doesn't seem to get a whole lot of sun (although the lawn looks great) and we have some nice flowers, shrubs, etc. on that side of the house. I'm just wondering if the area will get enough sun during the spring and summer to make growing some veggies possible.

So a long way to get at my question..... Do any of you know of a free on-line program to figure out the amount of sun exposure at different times of the year at various locations. (I know that the area in question will get more sun in the summer than it does now, but not sure how much). I seem to recall seeing such calculators at some solar energy sites, but can't seem to find them now.

Thanks for any info and help on this!

Anne