growing in the ground and soil requirements
Peter Taggart (Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:36:36 PDT)

What size are the animals you hope to exclude with the wire mesh? could
some rodents get through this?
Summer growers prefer the ground here because of the erratic conditions
watering pots gives in Summer, many plants grow better in the ground, but
they get mixed up and can be harder to control if they become weeds.

Several of the genera you list have both Summer growing and Winter growing
species, as well as arid growing and wet growing species. You will need to
allocate beds to particular micro climates and try to manipulate the
conditions in each bed to give appropriate conditions for the species in
that particular bed.

That said, a judicious bucket of water is often enough, and let the plants
get on with growing.
Nutrients are unlikely to be a problem unless you have chalk, crushed slate
or some other difficult material for topsoil and your compost should help
most such soils. With the climate I think you have -(do you have much
summer rain?),you may find the sand and pumice gives the plants a very dry
Summer, I think that you might want to use a fair quantity of organic
material.
Peter (UK)

On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 5:59 PM, Gastil <marygastil@yahoo.com> wrote: