I just read an article in National Geographic about the damage done by the "green revolution" of the 60's and 70's that encouraged mono-culture, dependency on heavy irrigation and petroleum based fertilizers supplied at no or low cost by governments in places like the Punjab region of India and sub-Saharan Africa. The soils got depleted and with climate change and drought, everything went to hell in a handbasket. (The article was actually about the food crisis brought on by population increase, made worse by climate change, unsustainable farming practices that promote the use of genetically altered seed and fertilizers produced in 1st world countries and sold to third world countries.)
It isn't that I don't know a lot of this already, but it all recedes into the background over time when I am not personally affected. An article like this one wakes me up again, and reminds me that the time is coming when either I, or my progeny are likely to be affected.
I've been talking about rain barrels for years and done nothing about it. I can't afford to buy them, but I bet there are plenty of plans and ideas to make them from cheap trash cans, etc.
Many of the blooms on the mop head hydrangea are just starting to show some blue. It is a water hog compared to the native hydrangea I have growing elsewhere. I get sentimentally attached to plants that were passed along to me by other gardeners who I love and respect, and this mop head is one of those. My friend Joe, who is in his upper 70's, is a true lover of plants. Loves collecting and propogating them, then passing them on. When I was still growing cut flowers for market, he'd come over and help me in the garden, just for the love of it. I don't really much like mop heads in the landscape (tho' they are wonderful in the vase, or dried and tied onto the Christmas tree.) But Joe loved this mop head. He pegged a branch, potted it up, and brought it to me in the fall of the year. I couldn't just cast it aside. So I pegged a branch to root from the one he had brought me, and dug it up and brought it along to this house when I moved. The native hydrangea I brought with me was also from him. He's having health problems now, and is getting ready to leave his house and garden and move into an apartment in a retirement community.
Joe is a real plantsman. He calls himself a "hunter-gatherer." His gardens are not particularly aesthically pleasing, but every little nook and cranny has something interesting growing. He uses a lot of found and scavenged materials for edging, etc. He got a bunch of cinderblocks from a demolition site that he used to build raised beds helter-skelter in his small backyard, and there is something growing in every hole in every cinderblock. There is a place in town that makes fake marble for countertops, and he has scavenged long, 6" high waste pieces from their dumping area to edge beds with. Roofing shingles mulch paths through the wonderful hegemony of his backyard. Tomatoes and larkspur entwine (intwine?) in the sunny spots, rare roses grow above a ground cover of strawberries, and scallions come up among the hellebore in spring. He's got pawpaw's growing on the back of the yard, some native, some oriental, and some that are natural hybrids between the two that he grew from seed after the insects cross pollinated them. He is the only person I know who will propagate roses from seed just to see what they look like after cross-pollination. When they finally bloom, he likes to guess from their appearance which of his roses were the parents. How can I not tend his hydrangeas with loving care?