Well the one two punch of a heat wave and 95 mile per hour wind gusts finally did in my Yerba Buena.
The terra-cotta most certainly did not help. Terra-cotta is a great pot material with one major downside/upside- it looses water to evaporation as the clay is porous. In a lot of cases this is great as it helps avoid overwatering. In the case of a mint it’s less great, and in the case of this mint with 95 mile per hour Santa Ana winds sapping the moisture from an already sun baked pot…
I think even if I doubled the water I was giving the thing it still would have bit it.
Luckily in San Francisco our namesake herb is not hard to come by.
But I’ll not make the terra-cotta mistake twice!
This lovely little glazed ceramic pot has a detached saucer to help keep the moisture in without contributing to root rot. Drainage is key!
I was using it for a houseplant which was a huge mistake- long story- so after fixing that mistake I now have a pot for my Yerba Buena.
Yerba Buena is a funny mint- it likes the shade rather then the full sun like most mints, but it’s surprisingly hardy like almost all mints and mint relatives.
Case in point.
This scraggly but healthy fellow is my other Yerba Buena- which I planted in front of some tomatoes and sunflowers, now dead in situ as I figure out what I’m going to do with the darn bed.
It is in almost full sun, and has been barely getting any water as I sometimes forget the bed full of dead sunflowers actually has one living occupant.
And yet it’s so vigorous despite all that it’s climbing to the back in search of new territory.
I’ll have to be careful when I pull the tomatoes and sunflowers. This brave little plant deserves praise for taking the worst this terrible gardener can throw at it.
And my new Mister Buena is settling into his new home.
Of course now I have to put up another white fly trap… as the winds knocked the one I had on off the pole.
Just another day gardening in San Francisco!
The Neanderthal Gardens 
That stuff grows wild in the old neighborhood; not so much here. I remember it in Montara too. It is a cool native, even if I don’t now what to do with it.