15 minutes twice per week is not enough water for anything in the garden to survive. What corner of hell do you live in? Please be specific. Fescue might not be the right grass or it might be the only grass. Need to know where you are. Can you use soaker hoses, buckets, or hand-held devices to water outside of the 15-minute window? I'm in San Antonio where we are limited to watering one day per week, but we have 7 hours available to us. In some neighborhoods we can use soakers any time of the week. Toward the end of last summer we were restricted to one day every other week but for the same 7 hours. That was enough time if your soil was prepared for it. If you had any runoff at all, then you were going to have a dead lawn. One thing that will help is compost on the lawn. I'm not big on compost but this is one situation where it can help to provide a micro-mulching effect that should conserve moisture. The application rate for compost is 1 cubic yard per 1,000 square feet. Another thing that will help water penetrate deeper into your soil is shampoo. I know, sounds crazy. And I know people here on this forum that fight the notion of putting shampoo on the lawn, but all they have to do is try it. The universities will tell you it doesn't work, but they turn around and use a very similar chemical to make their RoundUp work, so I don't get it. The application rate is at least 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet. That means if you have 3,000 square feet of grass, then put at least 9 ounces of any clear shampoo into a hose end sprayer. I like to dilute it with plenty of water to make this flow easier. Spray it at any dial rate, as evenly as you can, until the spray bottle is empty. The amount of dilution makes no difference - just get the stuff on the soil. Then follow that spray job up with a full inch of water (while you can). Use cat food or tuna cans to measure 1 inch. A week after you spray the shampoo, water another full inch. Two weeks later, repeat the shampoo and inch of water. That is all you need. If you really want to go crazy, one of the gurus on another forum spray his yard every week with the equivalent of 50 ounces per 1,000. He was trying to soften his soil very deeply. Don't know how that worked but the report is that the heavy soap treatment did not harm the lawn, so we learn a little bit every time someone tries something. Another one of the gurus on that forum posted a picture where a limb had fallen from a tree and embedded itself 27 inches deep into his soil...after he had been using the shampoo. At first I thought it was a bunch of hooey until the tree incident. Then I tried it. That was 2 years ago and my soil still gets very soft when I water it. It is so soft you have to be careful not to turn your ankle when you walk on it. I'm talkin' soft! Then when it dries out it gets hard again. And then soft when I water, so it's back to being normal soil. This shampoo treatment, by the way, takes the place of core aeration if you had been thinking of doing that. Shampoo actually works (all the time??) where core aeration seldom works to soften the soil. There are many (MANY) alternatives to having grass. If this is a one-year thing, mulching the lawn area is a perfect alternative. Find a tree trimmer with one of those pull behind chipper shredders and see if they will dump a load on your lawn. 3 inches of mulch will keep your underlying soil as healthy as it can be while everyone else's soil dries out and becomes unhealthy. Then next year when the rains return, you can pull back the mulch and sod or seed immediately. Mulch really does cure all the ills of the soil. Other alternatives are more permanent. Let us know if you might want to do something else. Also, how many square feet or acres are you talking about?

I'm loving this thread. I haven't been out weeding, deadheading etc. in the last two weeks or so because I've been on deadline for a work project. And it's been killing me, because this has been almost perfect gardening weather in southern California, perhaps some of the last we'll see before everything seriously starts to fry. Tick. Tick. Tick. All of us hear it at one time of the year or another - that relentless internal clock we use to measure time slipping away as important garden tasks that "must" be accomplished get deferred. Or cancelled. Prune the fig tree? Too late. This season's figlets have already formed. Prune now and I'll have a beautifully shaped fig tree. And no figs. So I was thinking how neglected the garden was looking when I found an unsigned note in my mailbox on a bright blue index card: "Thanks for having such a pretty front garden. The colors are a beautiful addition to my morning walks." In the eye of the beholder, indeed. And yes, absolutely, it is the journey. What you don't realize until you've been traveling on that road for awhile, however, is that all the time you thought you were changing the garden, the garden was changing you. Kay

While many who have never lived anywhere else love the Pacific Northwest, I who lived for fifteen years in Phoenix, hate it. Yes, many plants grow well here but....it rains. It rains and it rains and it rains. You can't go out and garden unless you don't mind being damp and muddy. Spring is especially rainy and then the rain stops July 4th and everything fries. I was born here and I've lived here over twenty years this time but if my husband would move I'd be out of here in a heartbeat. A retired person would have it better than I do though because they could take advantage of nice days during the week that I can't since I work. I have online gardening friends who live in colder climates but have flowers much longer than I do, especially waterlilies. I never get a bloom until July and people with sunnier springs get them in April. What you consider gardening paradise depends on what kinds of plants you want to grow. If you are into tropical then San Diego or Hawaii can't be beat...if you can afford it. If you want a blend then San Francisco or many parts of the South are great. Lilacs and Crepe Myrtles, Agapanthus and Azaleas, Rhododendrons and Gardenias.

This is a good thread. We have more annual rainfall than you Californians, about 40", but have long summer droughts and very heavy soil, somewhat compensated by the garden's being on a slope. We get snow most winters--last winter was a wet one, with five feet of snow that melted however promptly--but temperatures rarely fall below 20F, tending to stay in the thirties and forties much of the time during winter. I grow my plants as others have described here: roses and shrubs underplanted with subshrubs, perennials, bulbs, and self-seeding annuals. We don't water plants after the first year. Last year we went four months with one centimeter of rain: most things survived. We keep a heavy mulch on our beds. My plant list: Bearded iris, which I DO like; this is unkillable if you don't overwater it. Also I. orientalis, more commonly known as I. ochroleuca. Snakeshead iris, an iris relative, is good. Lavender, mostly lavandins (L. angustifolia x L. latifolia) and L. angustifolia and close relatives: these are hardy and don't mind heavy soil. L. stoechas may need looser soil; my finely cut tender lavender died to the ground last winter but is coming back. L. lanata is supposed to be tender, but I've never seen cold damage on mine: it has brilliant silvery foliage and violet flowers, and does well in hot, dry places. Artemisias of every kind, perovskia. I hear some of these can be invasive; in my garden I think they employ all their energies just staying alive. Caryopteris is good and handsome; sometimes it seeds. Thymes don't hold up well, but I think they might do better at the feet of roses with some protection from sun and wind. Mother-of-thyme (Thymus serpyllum) does very well this way as a ground cover, as does the caraway-scented thyme, the botanical name of which escapes me. Common culinary sage does well for me and is a handsome plant that the bees love; if it's particularly happy it will self-seed. The form with purple leaves dies out, but the yellow-variegated kind does great without summer water: mine stays prostrate. I'm beginning to discover the ornamental sages. I was recently given S. microphylla and S. 'Indigo Spires'; the giver tells my they both do well in a dry garden, but I'm watering mine as they're in their first year. S. guaranitica is a magnificent plant, but it gets big (think two meters tall and wide, though somewhat open in growth) and needs a little shelter from sun and wind, but it's not fussy. Rosemary in its many forms. It can be killed by a very wet winter, but I just plant a new plant: like most of these aromatic plants it's very easy to grow from cuttings. It stretches out and roots as it goes. Dahlias and kniphofias (red hot poker) are surprisingly modest in their water needs, at least if they're in heavy soil. Spring-blooming bulbs do their growing in winter and early spring when there's water, then go dormant in summer during the dry period. Daffodils, tulips, crocus all thrive here. Many of them need winter chill, and critters like them, except for daffodils, which have the enormous virtue of being poisonous. Common daylily (Hemerocallis fulva) grows everywhere. In California I'd be checking out the native bulbs. More aromatics: every kind of Nepeta; lavender cotton (Santolina) in all its varieties; Phlomis, to which a friend recently introduced me; this year I'm trying hyssop in the open garden. Field poppies, the annual red poppy that you see in Impressionist paintings; that stately weed mullein (it does take up a lot of space its second year). Then there are the drought-tolerant shrubs, but that's another discussion. Gardening is always an experiment. Our garden is influenced by our deep and heavy soil and by our usually generous annual rainfall. Since we don't water in summer we usually can grow plants like rosemary in heavy ground, but if we do get a lot of rain in late spring or summer, rosemary can die. A dry garden in summer means that we usually don't have to worry about our tall bearded iris rotting or losing our daffodils. We have enough winter chill for temperate climate plants. There are so many factors that influence a plant's growth that it's worth trying ones you like. Melissa