What garden? Lately I’ve been contemplating buying a few dozen of these rocks and stationing them around the property. Sometimes, it seems that I’ve killed more plants than I’ve planted. I know that doesn’t make much sense, but there were a lot of things here when we got here. And we have a nursery with about 30+ bushes and trees waiting to be planted. But so many that have actually already been planted have died for various reasons: gophers, squirrels, wind, heat, frost, and lately – chickens. I just want to keep what we’ve got hanging in there until we get some rain from the monsoons.

Here is the herb garden that was weeded. Our herbs took a bit of a hut over the winter and from the gophers last fall. What we had left was a large rosemary, a bit of Mexican oregano, some time, and a pineapple sage. Sue’s Russian sage had self seeded, so we have some plants that came up from seed; the gopher took the main plant. Yes, I know it’s not culinary, but neither is the Coreopsis that we planted at the end. I also added a lavender bush, since they tend to do pretty well here. Also planted some dwarf sunflowers – we’ll see if they get past the seedling stage. To help them along some, I put up a barrier of chicken wire and wine bottles (we have a ton of bottles available at the moment) hoping to discourage chicken scratching and pecking and eating of my plants! Grrr. As for the gopher issue, we don’t plant anything in the ground any more, unless it has its own gopher barrier basket. We’ve purchased some and and we’ve made many more. They all give the plants a head start, but once their roots get outside the basekt, there’s no guarantee that they’ll survive.