Deserty living aka western US

Okay, so it's not a desert desert, but the rainfall here is maybe half where I've mostly lived in my life. Certainly it isn't Arkansas, which is currently floating down the Mississippi! And we er, definitely are not lacking for snow. Still, this is the first place I've lived where you actually have to water grass. Is that not a bizarre concept? Where I'm from (and mostly wherever I've lived), you basically throw some grass seed on the ground and come back next week and mow. Here, people carefully install turf, and if you don't have a sprinkler system, you spend all summer moving a sprinkler hose around your yard. Wild. I went to a Relief Society get-together this week (LDS women's group) that was on a theme of gardening, only it was largely about how to take care of your grass. Seriously. Complicated stuff like aerating your lawn, what kind of fertilizer to put on when, how to best cut your grass (too short means too much evaporation), etc. We uh...mostly just mow the grass and that's the extent of our plant-growing abilities. So I felt a little out of my depth there...

The other weird thing here is that while there are plenty of rivers flowing out of the mountains (bringing melted snowpack* down to the farmland valleys), there's also a large network of irrigation ditches. They are dry all winter, but then they turn them on in the spring. So that was about two days ago. It's really quite strange to see rivers turn on and off.


*Given the high snow levels this year, they're predicting some flooding along with this year's melt. So I don't think we need to worry about lack of water anytime soon...