Texas Gardening: Hello Texas!, 1 by goofybulb

goofybulb wrote:
Hello, everyone!
Today I'm celebrating a month of being in El Paso. Let me sum up this month's happenings:
I kinda got used with the heat. I'm just ignoring the outside thermometers whenever I see one.
Who said it doesn't rain in El Paso? It rained 3 times already! only 5-10 minutes, barely humidifying the soil surface, but it does. How do you know how many inches of rain fell on the ground? We got used with watering the lawn. But we're not spoiling it, just once a week, deep watering.
We figured out how on earth the swamp air conditioning works. It wasn't enough to turn it on from the button. We were supposed to turn on the water too... So it wasn't broken, and the cooling until then was mainly the temperature difference between night and day. Oh, well...
I bought 3 lip balms, that I've used the first week of being here. Now I just have them sitting around in the house. My husband really got used with the weather, he played volleyball and soccer outside with his colleagues.
I only killed 5 plants since I got here, which is surprising. More surprising is that 3 of them were roses, and one was a lavender. I think I am the worst gardener ever. Hopefully I'll improve with time. In the meantime, I bought myself a golden barrel cactus, to decrease the odds. Now, I wonder, with ALL THIS RAIN, will it survive? I also bought a book about Southwest gardening, and read 2 more. This doesn't mean that I'll not try growing whatever in the "wrong" zone...
I am amazed at how many blue flowers Texas has, especially since it's said that blue is a rare color for flowers.
I've seen humming birds for the first time in my life! They are wonderful and extremely speedy. Someone has a pic in PF with a hummer at a chaste tree. How did he/she take that photo?
I've also seen some huge bees (about 1 inch) and some crazy bees, that chopped and chomped almost all the leaves of my 7 (at that time) roses (remember, 3 of them...).
I stopped drinking 3 mugs of coffee a day. Now I'm at just one. Apparently my body refuses more coffee if it's too dry outside.
The parts of El Paso I've seen so far have a unique charm. I'll show you in a bit. But first, here's my new baby. We named it "slurping soup" (this is the rough translation from Romanian)!