High Winds Bury Homes in Tumbleweeds
Tumbleweeds press up against P. J. Marcy’s front windows like overly eager solicitors, piled so high she can’t see her front lawn.
Her neighbor Cassandra Foster’s 40-foot pool is choked with dozens of the waterlogged prickly bushes. And throughout their Camarillo neighborhood, mounds of tumbleweeds stand at attention curbside, lumped on top of each other like litters of sleeping kittens.
What is this, the Wild West?
Over the weekend, powerful Santa Ana winds gusting up to 85 mph combed a fallow agricultural field that lies parallel to Sierra Mesa Drive, yanking the plants out of the ground and sending hundreds of them tumbling into the neighborhood north of Los Posas Road.
It is such an unusual sight that it is almost comical: cars dwarfed by the bushes, frontyards re-landscaped in a cloud of brown shrubs that reach to the eaves of suburban homes. But residents aren’t happy about their wind-borne visitors.
“It’s funny but it’s not so funny,” said Marcy, looking out her kitchen window at a sea of the terrorizing tumbleweeds, which are also called Russian thistles.
Before the high winds, the tumbleweeds were growing in an 80-acre field owned by Pardee Construction Co., which is building a 265-home development on the site. Until July 1995, strawberries grew in the field, their aroma wafting pleasantly over the neighborhood.
Without the crops, the Russian thistles quickly took over the acreage, growing so rapidly that they went from small sprigs to giant bushes within a matter of months. As summer passed, they died, turning into dry twigs held in the ground by only a small root. Neighbors say Pardee should have been out there cleaning them up before the fierce winds set in.
“It was pretty irresponsible of them not to have harvested them earlier,” Foster said, picking her way through her clogged lawn with her 3-month-old baby, Michaela, held against her shoulder. “It’s just arrogance on their part.”
She pointed out her Christmas tree, which she and her husband purchased last week. Propped against a wall in their yard, only the top two feet of the tree poked out from a jumble of tumbleweeds. “We can’t get to it,” Foster said.
But John Osgood, an assistant vice president at Pardee, said the company had no way of knowing that the plants were going to take over the neighborhood. He said Pardee is waiting for a grading permit that company officials expect to receive any day now, which is why the plants were left in the field.
Standing in Todd Terres’ backyard on Vista Coto Verde, Osgood said he was amazed by the mass of tumbleweeds.
“This is an act of God that we basically had no control of,” he said.
Camarillo code enforcement officer Gilbert Smaby said Pardee has not broken any city rules. The company is in compliance with the city’s annual tumbleweed abatement program, which gives residents and businesses until Dec. 23 to clean up the plants. Smaby said the developers have been responsive to the city.
“We notified Pardee,” he said. “They were pretty cooperative the moment they heard about it.”
In response to a series of angry phone calls and faxes from residents, workers from Pardee started removing the bushes Monday afternoon, but Osgood said it will probably take two days to remove them all from neighbors’ properties.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Anne Williams, Terres’ next-door neighbor. Last year, Williams led a neighborhood crusade against Pardee, fearful that dust from the strawberry fields that was blowing into her backyard contained pesticides.
She said Pardee put down a polymer coating in the field, designed to keep down dust, as a result of neighborhood activism. But that coating wore off, and the Russian thistles moved in.
That is characteristic of the plants, said Rick Burgess of the Ventura County chapter of the Native Plant Society. Such tumbleweeds are native to the high plains of Russia. They probably arrived in California as seeds in the bags of soil used as ballast on ships, or in the thick coats of livestock imported from Europe. But they love the California climate, and former strawberry fields suit them just fine.
“They thrive in disturbed areas,” Burgess said. “An agricultural field lying fallow, with lots of nutrients and lots of sun, those are perfect conditions for them. They’ll just take over.”
Meanwhile, Marcy, an East Coast native more used to snowdrifts under her windows than drifts of tumbleweed, is taking snapshots to send to her brother in Massachusetts. And hoping that the tumbleweeds aren’t planting seeds in her front lawn.
“The thing is, this is how they spread their seeds,” she said ruefully.
