Lily needed a little help reading the rain gauge; she reported 0.925 inches of rain. With a nice rain on Tuesday, filling my rain barrels until they overflowed, I realized I needed another place to store water. I didn’t want to buy another rain barrel, but needed something else to store water. But I didn’t want to have all these barrels lined up filling with water – sooner or later, I would need to move that water to where it was needed.. It occurred to me that the water I am saving from pre-warming my shower could go anywhere I already needed. As such, my latest storage vessel is a galvanized trashcan with a lid – one I had and used for yard waste before I went with cans on wheels only.
I spray painted it to tone it down (terracotta) and tucked it behind the Leyland’s in my Xeric area. While it will ultimately be my xeric zone, I am still adding plants to this area. Now I have another area to store water to care for my new plants until they are established. Once this happen, the trashcan can be re-purposed for other things such as a planter, container to cool down drinks in the summer or even go back to using it as a yard waste can. With my new forming water totting mussels, I may not need to just have cans on wheels.
Another trip to Tony’s (Plant Delights Nursery) resulted in a few more plants for my winter garden. I build my gardens by purchasing plants in the season they peak, or when there is a good sale on, or when I am visiting a garden center and something catches my eye, and when…well, I guess that covers all the reasons I buy.
This particular visit to Tony’s resulted in a curious purchased. Once I read about it, I knew I would eventually have one, but I really wanted to see how long I could go without buying one. To make it easier not to have it right away, I also included the caveat that I would not purchase it mail order. I wanted to see what I was buying. Of course I knew Tony had it, so I had to be careful not to go in the greenhouse that housed it. But there I was in the greenhouse that housed the Cast Iron (Ass;…) I was looking for and of course it was crowed so I had to walk around the opposite side and then come back around. Sure enough, I saw something that peaked my interest and there it was…Wollemia nobilis.
I never considered myself to be a collector, but I guess a good definition of a plant collector would be if one buys a plant for the plants’ sake instead of another reason – say a pretty flower or a particular color that is known to attract more butterflies than a genus’s paler version. It was kind of pricey. Let just say that if was a dinner in a travel book, it would be listed as $$$$$. When my kids saw it, they weren’t impressed. So I told them it is a genus that was around when the dinosaur roamed. They then wanted to know why it was so small – dinosaurs being big and all, they would crush this little thing. All I could think to tell them was it too could grow up just like they would.
