Did you plant these in end of May/June? I always plant water/shade lovers like these in cool weather. Planting them in early Summer in Texas is your problem . They have gone from planting stress immediately to heat stress and not having any time to establish deep water delivering roots.. How much sun does it get? I can't really tell you how long it will take to establish. I do not know your ground or how growing conditions in Houston. My suspicions are that you will have stalled plants no matter what you do till it turns cooler. If it is getting sun, I would put up some cardboard baffles to protect it. Can you put in a temporary soaker hoses? I combine them with a manual timer and that saves gobs of time hand holding a hose.

Very interesting post, everyone ~ Thank You. We've come to the same conclusion in Ontario, Canada. The back yard is luscious and green in any drought condition. We also like the smell. The entire back yard is surrounded by patio or garden. The creeper will grow in runners over top the stone and mulch. Two or three times a year, we simply pull it out, from the perimiter of the lawn, to maintain the edge and prevent spreading. Grass still grows around the creeper, throughout the yard, so the lawn is beautiful. We've slowly come to the conclusion that dandelions aren't growning in the back yard... No other weeds, but creeper and grass. The front yard, on the other hand, is a different story. We live beside a park, and the city maintenance crews and snow plows make a mess of the first 8 feet in... Plus, the city maintained park does not use herbicides, so the dandelions, and other weeds we can't even identify, are rampant. Not to mention people walking their dogs that think it's acceptable to let their pets use the lawn as a toilet. This morning, we thought of the brilliant idea to transplant creeper along the edge of the front yard, and let it go.... "Can't be any worse than what we're already looking at..." So, after searching the web, and finding hundreds of sites detailing how to control it (instead of enjoy it), we finally found you! (Now we know we're not crazy.) So, the plan is to pull out some runners, and simply place them on fresh, black earth, raked into the ruts at the edge of the lawn... We'll try a couple of shallow shovel fulls of creeper, too... We'll keep you posted.

ROFL! Now I know what to expect if I ever have to give Charlie a pill. I have an old trench coat I put on just to clip his nails!

Cats LOVE freshly turned ground, it is like a giant litter box for them, my mom couldn't keep her petunias because her cats kept digging them up, they also love her bird of paradise, and it is in the house, it is just a cats nature. I adopted a cat that was born in the wild, I tried to keep him inside, he would not so I started leaving him out, my neighbor came over one day and told me he had laid on one of her hostas and killed it, I immediatly brought him in, he cried and cried, about 2 months later I was staying at my moms and my husband accidently let him out, well he is not one of those people who will run a cat down to bring it back in, the next day when I got home he was curled up on our porch sick, it was Sunday and we live in a small area with no emergency vets, I took him in first thing Monday morning and he died in my arms in the waiting room. Poisoned. My 9 year old son (it was his cat) made me promise before I took him to bring him home no matter what. so here I am out in the yard with 2 bawling children (and myself) trying to bury Chrys, and of course all my neighbors are right there saying how awful it was, meanwhile the whole time in the back of my mind all I could think of was that one of those neighbors was responsible for this even though it was really our responsibility to keep our cat inside, one day later another neighbor who owned the mom to Chrys and had his brother came over crying, someone had poisoned the brother too, so there I was again burying another cat because she just could not do it. No more outdoor cats for me period. she has another outdoor cat that kills squirrls all the time, and I am forever going over there and disposing the bodies for her, just yesterday I was in my tulip garden and lo and behold, cat potty. but for some reason I cannot get worked up over it, I of course said a dirty word when I ran into it , but I would never think of doing something to someones pet because of it. there is about a 50 percent ratio of outside cat owners here, it aggravates me because they do not even try to keep them in (one was trying to go in and the owner just ever so gently pushed her back out and shut the door) when we was trying to do the right thing we got punished anyway. The main reason I don't mind all the outdoor cats is because we have NO MICE, that is worth it to me, but I will never claim another outdoor stray, if I even get caught feeding one it becomes my problem in the minds of my neighbors (they have to be watching me constantly, I swear!) I have had to haul 10 so far to my moms, I am so glad she has that nice big barn on her farm!