Weeding the Web

A home-made garden sprinkler

Grass? What grass? Our lawn is currently more brown than green, even with a few showers recently, but at least we haven't had to mow it any time recently.

Meanwhile, soft drinks bottles get used a lot in gardening - as watering cans, cane-toppers, mini cloches. Bet you hadn't thought of this lawn sprinkler as a DIY garden project.

see more There I Fixed It

A new type of hanging basket

Weather-wise it’s been close to sublime in the South-East for the last few weeks, but that always means that the garden suffers. And nothing needs watering like hanging baskets.

Back in February I met the inventor of a new type of hanging basket, born – as so much is – from a complaint made by inventor’s wife. When Mrs Larwood told her husband Alan just how difficult it was to plant up the sides of a hanging basket, he got to work and invented Dr Foster’s Perfect Plant Container. Interest is such that it’s been taken up by QVC here and in America.

Cunningly, it’s designed so that you assemble the planter as you plant it up. More pertinent to the weather is that a reservoir in the base retains moisture and, as it’s plastic, it the soil doesn’t dry out as quickly. Sadly it’s not recycled plastic, but this, Alan Larwood told me, wasn’t up to the job as far as the clip fastenings between the sections are concerned.

Flowers are obviously a front-runner for planting up, but strawberries work well and with three tomato plants in the top, you can use the side openings for cut-and-come again lettuces until the tomatoes grow larger. One of Alan’s satisfied customers has even used the brackets supplied to attach eight to a free-standing fencepost.

His website isn’t the most sophisticated, but the video does its job and shows exactly how it works.