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I grow oregano, thyme, and rosemary in window boxes year round, and basil this time of year. The other kind takes too much space. The reason for my irrigation question is that in the US desert good sense about water is hard to find. In the Arizona desert fields and nut orchards are regularly flooded, for days on end, to a depth of several inches. They steam in the sun, much of the water evaporating. The crops themselves are often wildly inappropriate to the desert. The silliest is icebreg lettuce, essentially water held in place by a green membrane: most of the US crop is produced outside Yuma, the driest and hottest place in the country. All that water comes from the Colorado River, which no longer flows to the sea, its once-productive delta a salt desert, and the Sea of Cortez, a bountiful fishing-ground, is gradually dying from the change in salinity. Behind this incredible waste is subsidized water from ecologically-flawed water-management systems. Farmers pay much less for water than city-dwellers, which means there's little incentive to use it economically. A couple of years ago there was a major drought of several years' duration in the Klamath River basin of California and Oregon. The Klamath was the most productive of our salmon rivers until it was dammed for desert farming. The flow was regulated to allow for the survival of some of the salmon, which are the basis of a fishing industry and also the major protein source for the local Indian tribes (and central to their culture), which are guaranteed the resource by treaty. Came the drought and the bodies of hundreds of thousands of salmon clogged the river. So the flow was increased, and the farms withered. Then came the political backlash--there are a lot more farmer votes than Indian votes, and treaties be damned. There seesm to be no solution except the obvious one--remove the dams and do arid land farming. But that won't happen. Mark At 02:42 AM 4/21/2007, you wrote: >Mine are only of culinary interest - sage, thyme, oregano, that kind of >thing. Heady in their own way, of course. > >You can probably imagine that the North American usage is not unknown here. >I used to know a guy who tied red Christmas balls to his, so passing police >helicopters would think they were tomatoe plants. > >xA > >On 4/21/07, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote: >> >>I think you may be using the term potplants in a different sense than >>we do in North America. >> >> >-- >Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au >Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com >Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com