Thirsty Plants

The plumbing was officially finished this last Saturday! If only we had a hose that I could have used right away, I know all the plants were dying of thirst but I started looking around for the old red hose we saw laying on the patio some time ago and found it was gone. Probably taken by the previous owner just like all the knobs from our built-in cabinets (lucky for us though he left us plenty of trash to compensate). So on Sunday, I forced Patrick out to Home Depot and we bought a hose, a hose reel and a longer shovel. The shovel because my coworker came to the house early Saturday to adopt some of the plants I don't like and found that we only had a useless half-size shovel. Also, there was just the one so I got to watch her digging in the dry dry clay for quite a while to get at the plants she wanted. She took away the Purple sea Lavender,the succulents by the garage, and a couple of Irises. Not that I dislike Irises, the ones we've inherited just need to be divided and replanted quite badly. I think they'll bloom big and blue next year from what my neighbor has told me.

When we got back to the house, we spread out the very kinky hose and turned on the water. Sadly, we found that the hose bib leaks quite badly in the on position. We put a bucket under it for the time being but will ask our contractor if he can fix it. Next, we found out that the nozzles we bought for the hose were rubbish. The water should naturally not flow when one isn't pulling on the trigger but the manufacturer apparently doesn't agree. So we had a small stream of water following us to each of the plants we watered. The poor roses who I've been so cruel to, pruning quite a lot off of them in the middle of summer with no drink afterwards - they finally got a good soaking. We continuously watered around everything for a good thirty minutes, then set to work at clearing weed grass. But I swear the ground was already dry again, everywhere. At my parent's house if I water one of the beds, I see run off almost straight away because of the bad clay but our ground was so dry it just soaked up gallons upon gallons without one little trickle running away.

While this picture is from before we watered that yard, it shows from a wider angle all the progress we've made. Sadly, you can see the construction debris still there, but Abel assures me it will be gone this week.

Also, a very nice discovery concerning our strange little retaining wall.

We originally thought, with the grass tall on both sides of the wall, that the wall was made of poured concrete and then topped with some landscape rocks but now that the weeds are mostly gone, we can see that it is actually made of a lot of very nice landscape stones. Whoever put it up must have laid a line of stones then with a form around it, poured a bit of concrete on top, then did three or four more layers of rock and concrete. It's still a horrible sight but now we figure, as the concrete is from a very bad mix, we can buy some hand chisels and get the stones out to use for our dry creek bed.