My garden is growing like crazy due to all the rain we have had so far this winter and many of the plants are blooming ahead of schedule because then everything heated up to 90 degrees!
But more on that in a later post, as I am going to share a very humourous post but at the same time, informative as well, about using our beautiful native plants that we have in great abundance in California for your landscapes.
I will post it over two days, as it’s a bit long for this space. It was written by Antonio, one of the owners of Nopalito Native Plant Nursery in Ventura, CA
“I grew up in El Paso, home of the UTEP Fighting Miners, lots of good Tex-Mex Food and a town full of hippies. Yup, you would never know it but me and my neighbors, all 700,000 of them, were a bunch of pot-smoking, long-haired hippies. Don’t let the flag-waving, beef-eating, football-loving stereotype fool you……Every person in El Paso was and is a hippie.
A quick drive around any El Paso neighborhood (or any ‘desert’ city, for that matter) will show you the same thing – Small Lawns, Lots of native and drought-tolerant plants, and malls, government properties and even huge mansions all with the same type of low-water landscaping. Water Conservation and caring more about your water supply than how many pretty flowers you have are classic signs of a hippie community!
Let’s compare El Paso to the supposedly ‘green’, ‘liberal’ and ‘hippy’ Southern California. A quick drive around the City of Ventura will reveal just the opposite of my hometown – Malls and shopping centers with almost every kind of landscaping imaginable, government properties with huge amounts of lawn (wait, maybe that’s a golf course) and huge mansions with even huger (that’s not a word!) water bills. Average yearly rainfall in El Paso is 9 inches, Average yearly rainfall in Los Angeles is 14 inches. Using my ridiculous math skills that means that Southern California, on average, gets 5 more inches of rain a year than El Paso!”
http://nopalitonursery.com
