Happy Saturday!

I am now less than a week away from my upcoming trip to Los Angeles and Seattle and I am in a frenzy trying to get all the garden planted.

Why?

They are huge and needing more and more water. This week, I have been needing to water most of the seedlings twice a day, almost draining my rain barrel. Meanwhile, digging down a few inches into the soil of each of the beds, the soil is nice and moist. Did I mention most of the country is in drought this year? Yeah, the sooner I can get these plants in the ground, the less water I’ll need to give them.

Well, there is one other reason for why I need to plant most of the plants in 5 days. That reason is I can’t trust my aunt will take care of my seedlings. She can’t tell when my plants are stressed and need water. Besides, I can’t trust her to get out of bed to give my plants a few minutes of her time.

I can’t trust my uncle and aunt next door either because they are always out, either at work or doing grocery delivery.

So even when I plant my plants into the ground, I’ll have to make sure they survive a week without much water. Thankfully, I found a temporary and maybe a semi-permanent solution.

A few days ago, I came across a news segment about people shopping for drought-tolerant plants. At the nursery, the owner was interviewed and he mentioned a “water storing crystal”.

I was like “what the what?” I’ve never heard of such thing. I fell down a rabbithole searching for this thing – what does it do, how does it do what it does, does it work, etc. I immediately bought some to try. So far, I have been putting a small spoonful of this stuff into every planting hole and checking daily to see if the soil is still moist. With less than 20% relative humidity, things dry out quick here and it’s why I’ve been needing to water twice per day.

After putting a couple spoonful of the water storing crystals around the raspberry plants in the front garden 2 days ago, so far so good, the soil is still moist upon brushing aside the thin layer of mulch. That’s a good sign. I will need more mulch though.

It isn’t just the plants though, I still need to connect two rain barrels to the downspout next to the driveway. After finding out I have tapping into a downspout that doesn’t receive a lot of water, I had to disconnect that downspout and move the rain barrel to the other side of the house to be the overflow barrel to another rain barrel.

I decided to expand the rain water collecting capacity after seeing a few news stories about nearby cities and town running out of water by summers end. There have even been cities that are restricting its residents to use outdoor water. I became terrified that this can happen where I live. I cannot have such thing happen. No water to the garden?

So I began looking at the satellite view of my house, searching for another viable downspout. The only other one viable was the one next to the garage and the surface area is huge – spanning two stories. With this kind of surface area, in a long duration storm, I might need extra storage. At the same time, part of me feels like this is too greedy of me – hoarding gallons of rain water like people hoarding toilet paper in 2020.

Do you think I’m being greedy?

I want to thank you for visiting and a special thanks to Natalie for hosting WeekendCoffeeShare. Have a wonderful week ahead.