The Impatient Gardener
Convincing flowers to bloom: willpower over nature?
Power tool makes garden digging easy
Wouldn’t it be nice to find a power tool that makes garden digging easy? Just think about using a heavy-duty electric egg-beater combined with the power of a drill and you have the concept behind a handy gadget for digging in your garden. ‘You Can Dig It’ has taken this idea and built a handy tool for working in the garden. The spinning egg-beater shaped tool head scoops out soil quickly and easily. As the demonstration in this video shows, it’s also a very handy way to dig without damaging delicate wires or tubing.
Subsurface drip systems are new and efficient watering choices that are becoming popular. But one of the questions frequently asked about them concerns the ease of damaging lines with maintenance or planting. This little tool provides a great solution.
Consider using the ‘You Can Dig It’ tool in vegetable gardens, too. This is an area where you are likely to have a constant turnover of plants. Using a light-weight power tool for digging that will keep fingernails clean and make the job quick and easy, can take a lot of work out of gardening chores.
I stopped by the You Can Dig it booth at the recent CLCA (Los Angeles) Landscape Industry Show and shot this little informal video. Here’s what Whyny has to say about the You Can Dig It tool:
To make the You Can Dig It tool even more enticing, you can see it comes in a choice of colors! (Notice the display in the back of the booth.) You might want to try out this power tool to make digging easy in your own landscape.
More information:
Carpet stains: and the culprit is…?
If you have house plants and pets, do you ever find yourself wondering where the leak is coming from?
The smart array controller saves water, money and work
Although some of the more elaborate irrigation timers you can buy to regulate water in your garden may be a little pricey, buying a good smart array controller really will save you both water and money. This year the Los Angeles area has been gifted with slightly over average rainfall. Although many folks think we are getting a lot of rain it’s only because we’ve become habituated to low-rainfall winters with so many years of drought. Yet despite the groups of storms that have trundled through the area saturating soils, many residents have not considered turning off their irrigation. This leads to huge amounts of wasted water running off into the sewers – water we will desperately need come the dry season. The wasted water also means unnecessary higher water bills. Making the soil more sodden can also rot the roots of garden plants that will have to be removed and substituted come springtime. More expense. Too much water can clog drainage and cause erosion. Yet more expense to deal with. So perhaps there really is some wisdom in investing in a smart array irrigation controller.
Smart timers have sensors that will turn on irrigation when you need it and shut it off when you don’t. Many times the surface of the soil looks dry, but there is still plenty of water below where the plant roots reside and watering is not needed. Installing a smart irrigation timer means you never have to guess whether you need to water or not. In fact, you can get on living your life without even having to think about the weather. These controllers will handle the worry for you and save you the money you’d spend on wasted water and water damage to your landscape.
Check out the informal little video below. I stopped by the Aqua-flo booth last week at the CLCA Landscape Industry Show and got a chance to talk to Ignacio about smart array controllers. You might find some of this information useful in making your garden a more beautiful and water efficient extension of your living space. Who wouldn’t want to save water, money and work? And in addition to saving yourself money in the long run, you’ll be helping Los Angeles save precious water as our population continues to drain the limited supplies.
The Northwest Flower & Garden Show is next week!
Most of my posts are informational articles or videos. But this one is a straight blog entry.
On Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be doing seminars at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show. I’ve spent forever conjuring up the best PowerPoint presentations I can and getting ready to tell enthusiastic gardeners all about how “All the Garden’s a Stage” and how to recycle junk into art to create “Comedy and Drama in the Garden”. You’d never guess the theme of the show is “The Silver Screen Takes Root: Gardens Go Hollywood”, would you?
This is the third largest flower and garden show in the world and it will be filled with amazing garden constructions, booths filled with the latest goodies for gardeners, the most up-to-date information, colorful flowers and five days filled with seminars from some of the top people in the industry. I’m looking forward to meeting up with so many talented and knowledgeable folks that I’ve come to know either directly or through social media. This is heaven for the garden-addicted.
So if you find yourself anywhere near Seattle between the 20th and the 24th of February, make absolutely sure you don’t miss stopping by at the 2013 Northwest Flower & Garden Show!
Garden Power Tools: ‘You can dig it’
One of the newer efficient forms of irrigation is subsurface drip irrigation. But I was recently asked if the underground network of tubing wouldn’t be problematic for digging and other gardening issues. Well, after my latest trip to the CLCA Landscape Industry Show, I got one good solution to the question of digging: a product called “You can dig it”: a simple, easy to use, small digging power tool.
Take a look at the “You can dig it” tool in the video below. It looks rather like an adapted beater attachment for a kitchen mixer. The heavy-duty beater does to the soil what a good home mixer does to heavy batter. This easy dig solution would be perfect for areas where irrigation lines or tubing, electrical wires like low voltage or any other ground lines could make digging a problem. I’m thinking the “You can dig it” looks like an ideal tool for people with a lot of digging to do or as an aid for people with hand problems. Think of how easy it would make vegetable gardening or annual flower bed upkeep – both gardens that require constant planting upkeep.
To see more about this convenient little device, check out the informal little video I shot at the Landscape trade show. Who know? Maybe this is just the little garden power tool that would make gardening more enjoyable for you.
Outdoor lighting fixtures
Lighting can transform your garden into a magical wonderland after dark. It not only keeps the area safe and well lit but you can create all kinds of effects. Lighting can pick out shapes and focal points that might look totally different during the day. You can create glows, spot-lit areas, spill light over a flat area or define steps or edges. Shadows can be manipulated to create patterns or designs, while individual lights can define a theme, outline a special area or produce mood lighting.
Not only are there better forms of light distribution for artistic effects, but there are more choices in ecologically friendly and money saving lighting than ever before. You can go solar, low voltage or use LED lighting. And check out the wealth of lighting fixtures that can become sculptures or part of the design of your garden itself.
I recently stopped by the booth at Light Club USA where I was able to chat with Bruce Dennis about some of the exciting fixtures he had on display in the Los Angeles Landscape Industry Show. I’d already marveled at the realistic candle lights when I worked with the designer, Nick Williams, on one of his awesome landscape designs in Ojai. You can see the candles he designed in the video below at the Light Club USA booth. And there were other fascinating designs for light fixtures, too. Check out the little informal video I shot at the show and you can get some idea of how much fun you can have designing lighting in your garden.
Wildflowers Peak at the California Poppy Reserve
If you can, rush out to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve soon. Fields of bright orange are visible for miles away as the poppies paint the hills. Swatches of blue from millions of blooming purple-blue Lupins intersect the orange and contrast with huge spreads of glowing yellow from masses of tiny yellow Goldfields. If the day-glow colors aren’t enough to amaze you, you can go picking through miles of trails at the reserve discovering the glittering seed heads of Silver Puffs, the red-purple of Owl Clover or find yourself scurrying after a patterned lizard to check out its designs.
The Poppy Reserve is located in Lancaster (northern Los Angeles County), just southeast of the Grapevine, 15 miles west of Lancaster center, and about 40 miles north of the Santa Clarita/Valencia area. You can find more information at http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=627.
Plan on brilliant color and blustering winds. The winds are typical of the high desert at this time of year. Wearing a hat is a good idea. Keeping it on your head may be a challenge. But it’s worth the effort to check out the wildflowers peaking at the California Poppy Reserve right now!
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