Hi Incitatus First off I need to know if you are in Vail, Corona De Tucson, Basicly where. Because if you are in Tucson the temps are warmer than in Vail... So I need to know how much freeze they have gone threw. Just to let you know I have been growing plants in the high desert all my life, As child at Edwards AFB. My Mother gave me a little corner in the backyard which I grew a vegtable garden, in Casa Grand AZ. while in jr. high, and High School I also grew a vegtable garden. While in apartments in Tucson going to U of A I grew my veggies in pots. I work in a nursery in Tucson. To Start I would never water any plant everyday even in summer. Unless they were bedding plants, or in pots. Watering in the desert needs to be done deeply, it forces roots to grow deeply, and the plants don't get overwatered. The first sign of plants being overwatered is, the plants look fine except that they are not growing, not producing flowers. The second sign, is the leaves starting at the lower leaves turn compleately yellow, and will drop off. Bamboo I don't believe will have an over watering problem as long as they as the soil is a good draining soil. I believe watering everyday for 2 weeks is not long enough to do damage. The duller sheen could be due to the fact that the myrtles are going dormant. In some areas they can go compleatly dormant. In other areas they can go semi-dormant. Depends if you are near a wash, a large park or golf course, or near the mountains or in Tucson. It also depends on your yard and where thing are placed in the yard. This is known as micro climates. when I water to establish; I water once every 3rd day, in summer. Shrubs to depth of 18" trees to 18 - 22". I keep doing this untill I see leaves turning yellow, and droping. Then I will water every 5th day and deeper, till I see the signs again, then every 7th. till I get the watering down to once every 2 weeks. In winter I would water once every 4th or 6th day to start. Again I need to know your area to advise you on what plants to get for privacy. I don't want to tell you something to get if your area wont's support the temps for the plant. If you noticed my zone is 13. That is because I don't follow the USDA's idea of zone temps. That is because they do not take into concideration the extream heat we have to deal with. Any thing that is writen by Sunset deals with the western states, and have zone ranges that deal with all the climets of the west, and takes into concideration the extream heat we have to deal with. I tell you this because If you read something writen by someone who is in the east, and their information tells you, you need to add lime into the soil to bring the ph up to nutural,,, well that would be very bad for us because are soil is a high ph. We have to add acid to our soil to bring our ph down to a nutural level. I hope this isn't too much information to start. Naycat

It's absolutely amazing what Lanatana do here in the desert. Treated well, they (mine) actually become almost uncontrollable (lots of trimming even in the dead of summer). Some of mine froze last winter (yes, it can happen here in the Phoenix area). After a rather abrupt and extensive trimming, they have not only re-grown, they threaten taking over the gardens, new babies sprout up nearby, and they are beautiful! Ocotillo usually look nearly dead most of the year except late spring, but this being a very wet year... we see the exception. Ocotillos in general this year have stayed beautifully green all summer. Cacti are native, and thrive mostly on neglect. Don't water cactus that are settled in and native, or they will get root rot. Completely contradicting my previous statement, I have large saguaro cacti on either side of the giant lanatanas and other flowers, so they get watered daily in the summer. However, the watering is for the others, not the saguaros, and these are very stable and have been there for many years. We have many saguaros on the ranch that are fabulous, but never get water other than when Mother Nature graces us with a rain.

It was hardly my intention to mislead anyone, and I apologize for having done so if anyone has, indeed, been misled. I had assumed that by identifying our swap as a 'NEW' swap that folks would realize that it is, well, new. If anyone remains confused, please note that this is an entirely different swap, meeting for the first time November 4th, and has no connection with "THE Middle TN Plant Swap" held on the Buffalo River. I will be coming to your swap October 21st, Jan, and we'd love to see you in Hendersonville in November. Anyway, we have set the date/time/place for our next organizational meeting. It will be held Tuesday, Ocotober 3rd at 5:15 pm at White House city park. Anyone who's interested is most welcome! Any questions, comments, concerns etc, you can either post a follow up to this forum or email our group at BloomingIdiotsPlantSwap@yahoo.com.

I'm looking at the apparent group of adults seated together in front or under the red umbrella/tent and those standing to its right under the blue one. Groups of adults are rarely members of the same household. Your question to me is fair but in return, what made you think they WERE from the same household? I wasn't there and you were, so I'll defer to what you saw. The explosion of cases in Texas beginning a few weeks after Memorial Day suggests that there were a lot of careless and unsafe public interactions in many places and your photo seemed to show that. Maybe not. If people were generally seen by the authorities to be keeping away and at safe distances from one another, why was it thought to be necessary to close the beaches? No need to answer that, it's a rhetorical question. The topic of the thread is Galveston and so I'm not picking on this part of the country or Texas specifically. The same problem of irresponsible behavior and carelessness is happening in my area too.