We had a freak wind storm this week that blew down people walking down the street and interrupted power in a few neighborhoods.
It also highlighted why tomato cages are not optional- as it blew all my tomatoes off their gerry-rigged stakes.
For the most part everyone was ok- just on the floor.
I have so many ripening tomatoes- gonna be a good harvest for sure as long as I don’t have more wind storms. You can see how fungal the vines are though. That’s just San Francisco though.
Unfortunately I lost a whole branch of Julia Child.
If you look closely at the upper left quadrant of this photo you will see what looks like a dead vole.
It was a dead vole. During this whole windstorm calamity that dessicated half the garden I interrupted a feral cat hunting. Which of course meant all my re-staking, watering and saving of plants had to be done while stepping over entrails.
Yay nature.
Now while the tree collard looks dire it really wasn’t- just surface evaporation. A deep watering and it was fine.
Just about everything that could get blown over was blown over though.
Even the pineapple mint looked really dry from wind desiccation.
This charming platter once held two dill plants.
The dill plants are now here. Why?
Because they fell over and flattened the strawberry plant beneath them.
Don’t worry about the strawberry- he’s fine.
But pretty much everything in the garden looked very mussed.
But after a good late evening watering everything perked up the next day.
I had hoped against hope that the feral visitor would clean up after himself but he did not.
Here he is- a criminal fleeing the scene of the crime. My sainted mother ended up disposing of the body, and for that I am eternally grateful.
I don’t even know what the weather’s gonna be like in the rest of July. Considering everything that’s happened in 2020 so far- I’m almost expecting hurricanes.
And if that’s to be, then fine, but I’d prefer my hurricanes to not come with a side order of dead rodent.
I can only take so much.
The Neanderthal Gardens 
Vole? Aren’t those rare?
Fancy way of saying “field mouse”. Technically true- taxonomically they are voles. Most people just say mice though. For some reason in my house we’re more taxonomically correct. Bunch of over-educated weirdos here. 🤣
Okay, . . . I think. I know sort of what field mice are. (They were common in the Santa Clara Valley when I was a kid.) They are not totally uncommon. When the other voles moved into the region years ago, it was big news in the landscape industry.
Basically a lot of what we call “mouse” in America is actually biologically a vole. They’re also super cute and timid and one time one came out in the day and played with my late dog who was very perplexed. I really like them and I’m sad the local cats got this poor fellow.
They used to flee orchards as they were cleared for new homes, and roam into adjacent neighborhoods of the Santa Clara Valley.