Read somewhere that chefs get this all the time. Just lean into the joke and call it gourmet kibble.

Hey, talking about when you wrote down bits of their talk at the bus station. It's a great way to find ideas, but I always feel a bit off about using real people's conversations. They might not want their private moments turned into stories without knowing. You could still catch the emotion from the situation and then make up your own words for it. That keeps your writing feeling real but respects people's privacy too.

Oh man, I feel that... my own yard is a graveyard of "right plant, wrong spot" experiments. I tried a native shrub in a brutal sunny patch last year and it fried by July... sometimes the tough guy is the only one that can hang.