PLANTS in a desert.

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Las Vegas is fastly developing-- how fast you ask? When I first moved to Vegas there was a road being built, as in it was a dirt road. Now that road is fully paved and functioning. It's a pretty impressive thing. Except to get construction down so fast everything is cookie cutter and lots of corners are cut.

When I got here we had an issue with our HOA (home owners association). Basically there is this women in charge of the living community our house is in. Actually there are three communities like ours. Well, this lady basically gets paid by the housing complex to walk around and spy on the neighbors. Which she does pretty vigilantly. I thankfully have yet to meet her. Anyways, she didn't like the fake plants we had in along the drive way and said that we needed real ones by the end of the month. I had just moved in and had absolutely nothing to do with my time so I offered to do the plant planting for my roommate. She looked at me like I was crazy for offering.

I went to Lowes and talked to someone, telling them where I live and that I wanted easy to maintain plants. I stressed how much I didn't want to work on up keeping them. She laughed and pointed out pretty much everything that they sell, telling me that the HOAs keep their business prosperous. I ended up walking out with two tree like things, two low growing bushes and lots of flowers. I also realized I needed soil and a shovel so I got those too. I came home all proud of my pickings and started to unpack my little Honda Fit. Me and my spade got to work on the first hole. ....

When they build houses in Vegas they don't do the work of tilling the soil or even flattening it. So, as I'm digging with my small 'shovel', I realize that the ground is all ROCKS. That is right, rocks. There is no dirt just rock. It's not so easy to try and scoop out rocks when they are buried under each other. This must have been why my roommate looked at me like I was crazy!

I spent a few hours just on the first hole, which turned out to be one of the hardest. I had to live with the fact that this big boulder didn't want to budge and instead took up a lot of space that the plant should have to grow. Ok so, maybe it isn't a boulder but it's no rock either. This chunk of small small boulder was not budging so I learned to make due and poured in lots of bagged soil. Then I went onto hole two and three. Hole three had new problems. I was sitting on the cell phone, bragging to my parents at how awesome I was for planting a small tree and bush/ground cover thing, when I shrieked. I don't normally shriek but this was over weird looking cockroaches. They were brownish red and very much living in the hole I was digging into. My mom warned me about fire ants and thought I should stop digging because they might bite me. But, much like insulating my attic space in Michigan., I sucked it up and finished planting the plant. I'm still waiting for that last one to die since it was half out of the ground and I just covered it with bagged soil.

I finished my planting and I then used a garbage bag to cover the holes in one of the plant's buckets so I could fill it with water. Yes, I'm that ghetto. We do now have a hose thanks to Bre's friend Mark who found it so humorous that it was sad so he took pity on me and gave me a hose to use.

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