I’m lucky because, working from home, I can take a plant-watering break pretty much whenever I or they need it – but I thought it was worth asking for people who have to leave their veggies baking in their greenhouse all day without a comfort break.

Above ground sprinkler type things (like the one in the picture) are apparently very inefficient at watering veggies – too much of the water evaporates on the surface before it has a chance to get down to the roots.

I’ve heard of people using holey old garden hose as a makeshift drip irrigation system but that seems like it might be a little hard to manage the flow – in my mind, the question has a second part that didn’t fit in the headline up there: “how can I make a reused or recycled irrigation system that doesn’t waste too much water?”

Any ideas?

(It’s also important to consider preventative water-loss measures – mulching and the like – which cut down on the amount of water lost to evaporation — what’s your favourite reuse/recycle for that sort of thing?)

Since the weather has got rather autumnal and wet of late, we decided to pack away the garden stuff for the winter.

While hosing the dirt off pots, and packing away the hose itself, I noticed the hose had sprung a leak at a rather inconvenient position in its length.

We’ve got more hose to use in the cellar (as we had to buy it in a stupidly long length to start) but are there any alternatives? The split is about 2inches long, but just a split not a full on hole, so I don’t know whether a puncture repair kit would fix it. If it doesn’t, any suggestions on what we can do with the short lengths on either side of the split? Or the whole broken hose in general?

(Photo by Onatos)