Adding Water absorption crystals to the soil in potted plants and areas that dry out

Last summer, I ran into the problem with some of my potted plants which seemed to dry out way to fast under full sun, especially the ones that have well established plants. It seems like the soil looses it's capacity to hold any water when the roots take over the pot so one of my solutions to lessen the problem is mixing in water absorption crystals to the soil.

These crystals can carry 400 times their own weight in water, and they are supposed to last for multiple seasons, and they are supposed to be soaked in water before they are put into the pots to work best.

Here's the bags that they come in. I puchased 5lbs of this stuff so it should have the capacity to hold 2000lbs of water which should last me a while.

Receiving my new Bartzella double yellow intersectional itoh peony

As you can tell by my other blogs, I really like peonies and decided to get one of the most common types of itoh peonies which is a hybrid between a tree peony and a herbaceous peony. Some of them are supposed to die back all the way to the ground while others will develop hard stems like this one as they can have characteristics of both types. The one constant is that the foliage looks more similar to that of a tree peony.

Here it is all leafed out since it came from Tennessee. 

Update on the garlic

I have planted around 2000 garlic gloves last winter and not surprisingly, most of them are coming up now. I have around a dozen species, all in separate beds of both hard neck and soft neck species. I don't care much about the names since the foliage on them is very hard to distinguish, but I'll know they are different when I harvest them. One of the things I am noticing is that the ones planted earlier in october are just a little bit further along than the ones planted as late as December, but they seem to be catching up so planting times don't seem to be that big of a deal.

Here's my original species of softneck garlic which produces average sized cloves with a pretty decent flavor, but doesn't have a very long shelf life.