Equipment Is Good.

My large garden is physically challenging. I have no vehicular access to most of the garden, which slopes downward from the house. So any power equipment that makes life easier is rare but welcome.

Power Sprayer

After baling buckets of fish emulsion on my roses last summer, I knew there had to be a better way. I bought a sprayer to use for both foliar feeding and winter dormant spray. Since I live on a hillside and have a big garden below the house, I wanted something fairly mobile with a reasonable capacity: I didn't want to mix up 10 batches of stuff, but I also needed to be able to handle the weight of the solution.

I ended up with a 5 gallon FIMCO with a rechargeable 12 volt battery and 15 foot hose. The removable square 5 gallon plastic tank can be carried by the handle and is small enough to fit in a sink for filling with hot water.

Last winter, with the capable assistance of me, myself and I, I sprayed about 200 roses and my plum and apple trees with a lime-sulfur/dormant oil solution, dishing up about 25 gallons of spray. I started around 11 AM, made the obligatory 2 trips to two different hardware stores for additional supplies, stopped for a quick lunch, and finished cleanup by 5 PM. Not bad by local standards.

A Better Soaker Hose For Sloped Gardens

Because I use drip irrigation but garden on a slope that faces west into the wind in a climate with annual drought from April through November, I need to deep water my roses two or three times during the growing season. If you've tried to use a soaker hose for periodic deep watering on a hillside, you're probably found to your surprise that a lot of water seeps out of those things, enough to allow run-off. Ah, but for twice as much money, you can have a much better soaker hose.

I bought a hose-end drip irrigation setup, consisting of a backflow preventer, a pressure regulator, and a filter-connector that allows me to connect standard half inch drip tubing to the end of a hose. The piece of drip tubing isn't long, just long enough to be convenient, say 6 feet. The end is bent back on itself and secured. Then a long, 15-foot piece of 1/4 inch dripperline is connected to the drip tubing with a stop at the end. The dripperline emits through holes drilled every 6 inches in the line, emitting 1/2 gallon per hour per hole. This dripperline is very flexible and light. I stake it in a circle within the rose's drip line and turn on the hose for about 15 or 20 minutes twice a day over two or three days. In 15 minutes, 15 feet of dripperline emits 5 gallons of water, and none of it runs off. I know the soil is getting wet, and by watering over a couple of days, I can be confident that the water is getting deep. No need to stand around with a hose or waste more water than necessary.

When I go on vacation, with the addition of a timer, I can use the hose-end setup to operate a temporary sprinkler system for my roses in pots. Instead of dripperline, I use 180 degree microsprayers on stakes to spray a row of pots a couple of times a day. The system is far from perfect, but with some practice, I can keep plants alive while I'm gone.

Compost

Never one to stop tinkering, I relocated my compost piles last fall. I noticed a steady supply of compostibles (horse manure from Horse Hill, an only-in-Marin $10 million public-horse-field) 2 minutes from my house and needed a better way to make more compost faster. I've used plastic bins for a couple of years and never been happy with how hard it is to turn the compost. I also wanted to make more compost faster.

So I made the obligatory 4 trips to the hardware store to construct a 4' x 8' 2-bin structure that will be completely mobile if and when I decide to move the piles the next time. The shape is an E, with each bin 4'x4'.

I used 5/8" ADX plywood reinforced with 2 x 4 backing and staked in placed with galvanized conduit strapped to the plywood. Two pieces of brown tarp cut to fit each bin are held down by large rocks. Covering the compost keeps the moisture level constant and helps heat up the pile. The compost is really cooking, almost too hot to touch.