crime scene evidence

If you all recall, I have a tiny obsession with my garden that started around last spring and has grown exponentially, with the construction of raised beds, a compost pile and the purchase of other random garden accessories like manure. The past couple of weeks have been unusually cold for southern California. Areas in the valley have frozen, causing massive crop damage for citrus, avocado, and other farmers. Around here in Orange County, it's been less dramatic.

In preparation for the frost, I added some extra leaf mulch around my plants and thought about putting blankets over some of them. I later learned that adding extra mulch might actually prevent the soil from warming up during the day, so I may have to reconsider that action. I don't exactly have a bunch of spare blankets that I can use to protect my plants, so I whipped out an old t-shirt that I had selected to become a washing rag and headed out to the garden. I thought for awhile about which plants I would be the most sad about if they were to die. I settled on the chard plants, since they are uniformly productive and provide both leafy greens and squishy stems, and draped the t-shirt over them.

I don't think it ever actually frosted, but the leaves on some of my nasturtium plants were a little damaged. A couple days after the big frost scare, I went out to the garden to water, looked down where the chard plants had been growing, to find this:



That's right... There was nothing there!

Here is an approximation of what they looked like before:



Here is what they now look like:



Whatever animal made off with the plants left one tiny chard plant (if you squint, you can see a small red leaf directly to the right of the nasturtium plant in the last picture), but it is so small that the stumpy stems of the other chard plant are still bigger than the intact mini plant. It seems like it must have been a fairly large animal, but it's still weird. None of the other plants appear eaten or walked over and there are no clear teeth marks. How rude!