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Overwatering kills more house plants
than under watering.
- Roberta M Coughlin -
see
What's Coming Up #77
When the well's dry
we know the worth of Water.
- Benjamin Franklin, in Poor
Richard's Almanack -
see What's Coming Up #93
Water is critical as plants start
growing. Do check whether lawn, trees and shrubs need water even
before the sprinkler system is turned on. Don't just feel the
surface. Dig down about eight inches to check if the soil is dry.
It's surprising how dry it can be down deeper where the roots are,
even when the surface is damp.
- Mary Wilson, Michigan State
University Extension -
see
What's Coming Up #137
Below, left: Plump leaves
mean this jade (Crassula) does not need water. Below,
right: Leafless, here, it's nonetheless at a critical water-use
state while sprouting after cut-back. (See Jade cold cut
back.) It needs its regular amount of water -- one bottle
full wets all the soil in this pot and oozes just a little out the
drain hole -- but will need replenishment less often while it has
few, small leaves. Low light cuts the need, too. We might not give
it another bottle of water for 4 or 5 weeks during winter's dim,
short days.
You can use ice cubes set on the
soil to water plants, indoors and out. It's slow release moisture
for plants that don't like to dry down.
- Marge Alpern -
see What's
Coming Up #161
...there is
nothing more exasperating than a hose that just isn't long
enough.
- Cecil Roberts -
Funny thing about a hose: Too short, just right or too long, at
any length it puts up a fight when we try to manage it. Above,
left: Shelley Welch laughs while hose wrestling.
Above, right: When we look at those incredible expanding hoses
we think this must be what intestines look like. (A great idea and
fun to watch work, not one of the several we've seen or used have
lasted long before springing leaks.)
...set the basketball on the
kitchen table. Open a cupboard, get out a bottle of sesame seeds,
and place a single seed beside the basketball. If you were to
reduce the Earth to the size of a basketball, all the fresh surface
water on the planet -- all those rivers and lakes and ponds and
streams -- would fit inside that one tiny sesame seed. Add a second
sesame seed; now you have all the usable underground water as well.
Is fresh water a scarce resource?
- William Ashworth, The Economy of
Nature, 1995 -
Don't know why you feel compelled to do a thing a certain way?
Bet you saw someone doing it just that way when you were two.
- Janet -
We wonder what examples we are setting for kids today, who
will almost certainly see more water shortages than we've ever
imagined. Do we have enough reverence for a pond? Do we notice --
we didn't! -- the irrigation leak that existed for so many years
that it eroded the concrete walk?
.