Thursday, February 3, 2011

Cold Santa Ana Winds

Yesterday was about as much of winter as we get in San Diego with chilly Santa Ana winds blowing most of the day.  The winds knocked over several big Eucalyptus trees in La Jolla and brought down palm fronds in our neighborhood.  Fortunately no one was killed or injured by those Eucalyptus, but they crushed several cars.

Although we had our two palm trees trimmed a couple of months ago, the wind brought down the butts of a couple of the fronds that had been trimmed.  Although these butts don't look like much, they are pretty dense plant material and very heavy.  If they fall from a height, like off a fifty foot tall palm tree, they can cause a lot of damage to anything below.  We learned the hard way not to park our cars under them; we had a windshield smashed by one about ten years ago.

The Santa Ana is usually a hot wind that blows out of the deserts to the east between August and November, but because it's cold there now, the winds are cold when they blow in our direction.  Our friends and family are currently struggling with blizzards in the mid-west and east coast, so we're not complaining too loudly about the wind.  The last time it snowed in the city of San Diego was 1963 according to friends who lived here then.

Cindy worked out in the yard yesterday morning, trying to secure plants against the wind, but the buffeting of the wind was really exhausting.  One thing about winters in our climate is that there's not a lot of down time for gardeners to sit around and plan what they want to plant; there's always something outside that requires attention, or watering, or weeding, or pruning, or....  The list is endless.

O.K., enough whining.  By now, you've probably correctly concluded that San Diegans are complete weather wimps.  And so we are.

No comments: