Article: Planting and clearing for fire safety in brushy hillside areas.

Summer's end. In northern California's hillside communities, that means conditions may be ripe for wildfires. Temperatures hover in the 80s and 90s, humidity is low, and the golden grasses that grew high following last winter's rains now stand like so many dry, waving fuses.

Although wildfires are not the regular occurrences here that they are in Southern California, where each year moisture-wicking Santa Ana winds blow off the deserts and across the volatile, chaparral-blanketed hillsides (as in the picture above), they can be troublesome. Already this year, crackling-dry grasses have gone up in flames on hillside of South San Francisco, east of Chico, and in ...

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