On watering

It's kind of annoying. For much of the year, I tried watering the yard, almost flooding parts of it. And while the grass seemed to respond, and some other plants, and the jade plant leaves plumped up, a lot of patches remained stubbornly bare.

And then it rains, and suddenly everything's green, moss appearing in the desert. And I wonder, did I not use enough water? Was it too strong?

Or perhaps it's not even the rain, but the cooler temperatures, with lower evaporation and greater morning dew? The mosses in particular might care more about that. And the weather statistics won't tell me about changes at the centimeter-high microclimate level.