I like my friend JR’s attitude toward gardening in the desert:

I water almost nothing here. I do throw yesterday’s left over water from Cooper’s bowl on the autumn sage. It keeps the red blossoms coming and the hummingbirds like that. Some days the birds get the left over water. The New Mexico locust gets dishwater. That’s it. They grow slowly, but the Arizona ash, the New Mexico olive, the Apache plume, the Mongolian whatever it is, the lilac and the rest seem to do fine on their own.