WHEN YOU THINK OF WATER, think of BOB

Living most of the last 30 years in the US Southwest desert (New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado), it became clear that outdoor gardening is not my forte. Of course, it never helped that I was miserly with water - but with the drought and all.... I just felt it was the right thing to do. Of course the gophers didn't help much and the bind weed.... oh, the bind weed!

Well, an unusual thing happened the other day that I want to mention. I went to Bunnings (sort of an Oz "Home Depot") and while there, decided to invest in a few plants. Bunnings is probably not the best place to get plants (an employee even told me they don't take care of the plants there at all!), but since I was there, I thought "Why not?"... and I grabbed a few. As usual, my selection criterion were price, hardiness, easy care, drought and frost resistance, does it pass the "is it pretty?" test, and I do like natives. You might think I'm being cheap putting price first on my list, but remember that this sport is not my forte - do I want to sink a bunch of cash into something that's just going to die soon anyway?

.... well, to cut this story short, I planted one little plant right away, and the rest several days later (I'm not into heat much). This was a little guy with a lot of potential. I planted this plant (we'll call it BOB), next to the steps going up towards the house from our driveway. I'm hoping that BOB is a forgiving plant, because I had to build up a soil base for him. Oh, there's plenty of dirt here, but it covers plenty of rocks. So if BOB keeps his roots short, he should do alright. After planting him with some nice black soil mixed with other stuff that looked good, I gave him a nice bath of seaweed water. I don't know if seaweed is good for BOB or other plants, but it's usually green and I think that's probably a good sign.

The clincher.... what I have been leading up to with this story... is that an hour later, water actually fell from the sky and gave BOB an even better bath. Hey, you don't see that happen much in New Mexico... WATER... falling from the sky.... There might be some hope for me... better yet, there might be some hope for BOB. I'll keep you posted.

Cheers! Judi