Easy Gardening

Question: Why is the hot water in my shower oily?Answer: This is a challenging question. Have you had any work done to the pipes or the shower valve recently? Are the pipes in your shower galvanized steel and have they been worked on recently? These are the only two reasons I can see for oil to be in the shower water only, hot and cold. If the water heater was replaced recently oil that is used in the manufacturing of the tank sometimes remains. This happens very seldom, but it does happen. But if this was the case, there would be oil in every hot faucet. Does anyone else have a suggestion why this is happening?

These vignettes suggest waterflowing, tumbling, cascading, splashing or dripping wateryet there is none. Each illustrates the ingenuity of a garden designer in the dry, hot Southwest, where water is scarce. Yet the same concept, of creating the look of water, might apply to any garden.

In this composition, by Akana Designs for the San Diego County Fair, dry-climate plants look like wet ones. Aeonium canariensewhich like all succulents stores moisture in fleshy leaves in order to survive droughtappears to float downstream like water lettuce (Pistia stratiotes).

Also at the Fair, rattail cactus (Aporocactus flagelliformis) cascades over the edge of a dry fountain.

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IHATE TO WATER, but unless the heavens provide an inch a week, it requires human intervention on these two hilly acres with thousands of plants, a well that is understandably precious and limited, and no irrigation system beyond a few basic spigots to connect to. Lately, we’ve been blessed locally with extra rain; any day now, it could be hose-dragging time—which isn’t as bad as it used to be since I finally found a hose I can handle (and you can, too, if you win one of two I’ve bought to share).

First, a disclaimer, since my old-style journalistic policy is not to accept samples of garden products or plants, even for my giveaways, and because I almost never write about a product:

I got my first length of this particular hose when it was a prototype, in an inadvertent swap with the man developing it. Jeff Th

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However I have had a bear of a time keeping the water clear. For the first couple months after I made it it stayed clear. However once the pond got established, it got dirty. I could barely get the water clear for brief periods of time. In 2009 I bought a new pump/filter set. The same kind I had originally, because the first died. It is a small pump in a box with filter pads that goes inside the pond. It doesn’t work, I don’t recommend it. The new filter/pump did some good, but most of 2009 and all of 2010 so far (once it warmed up) the water has been murky and dark. I haven’t even fed the fish in months (and they’re alive, so they must be eating the algae and whatnot).

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