Quite amusing. Share with your friends.

A simple search for Gardening revealed hundreds of different projects for you to build. Here are three that jumped out at me today:

Scrooge Bottle - A great water saving device built to plant beside water loving plants. It is simple to make and cheap to construct, and is a great way to recycle old socks and soft drink bottles.

Pipe tools - creating a great planting trowel / shovel out of some steel water pipe is the best and cheapest way I’ve seen to create gardening tools.

Easy Garden labels - a thrifty student has used plastic spoons to make sturdy and long lasting plant labels.

So how about we all get out there and start creating things from old materials to make our lives in the garden easier.

Over the past couple of months we’ve been adding to our new large garden bed. We’ve put in plants such as Passionfruit, a lemon tree, Moses in the cradle, honeysuckles, ponytail tree, marigolds, vinca, lavender etc. All of these plants have different water requirements, but to help preserve what goes on, it has all been mulched with hay, and some parts have been covered with horse manure to help the hay break down into a nice rich topsoil / compost / mulch.

I’ve been using my standard watering sprinkler which puts out a whopping 990 liters per hour over a large area. It takes 4 moves of the sprinkler to get the whole area covered, and it is easy to forget to move it, and some areas get neglected from time to time.

Working with small scale irrigation systems is quite easy, even for the first timer who has no experience. Your basic setup requires a few key materials and a little common sense.

For our setup I bought fifty meters of 13mm hose, two T pieces, a hose adapter, a filter (to stop the drippers blocking) with pressure reducer (keeps it at 100 bar), and some drippers.

Overall it only took 30 minutes to install. The first step was to lay the hose out in the desired pattern, cut and fit joiners where required. Next attach the hose and fill with water, take the hole making tool and start installing the drippers.

Each of my drippers run at 4 litres per hour, I used these on the larger plants such as the lemon tree, passionfruit vine and other larger dedicated plants.

To make placement easier, I used some smaller 4mm flexible hose to attch to the main 13mm hose. This allows me to move them around the base of the tree as required.

Over my anuals (which will be replaced with perennials when the current perennials grow to be a bit bigger) I used a small rotating sprinkler head. Using upright raisers to get them above the mulch, they spin around distributing water over a larger area. The exact water usage from these is unknown at the moment, but should they begin putting out too much water, I can easily add taps to their raisers and they can be turned off.

The best part of creating your own drip irrigation system is that it can be modified at any time for little cost, once the initial financial outlay has been done.

By completing this job, my household water consumption should drop significantly thus reducing my water bill. Along with the installation of the low water toilet bowl and dual flush cistern in the bathroom, I’m taking the first step top making my house even greener.

For more information on DIY Watering systems you can visit:

• DIY Network
• Irrigation Tutorials
• Gardening Australia

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I purchased a 25 litre bag from a store that shall remain nameless. The pallet must have been sitting in the rain at some stage, an the water had got through the air holes in the bag. The result was a stinking anerobic decomposition which looked like grey slime.

I will grant that that was only half the bag doing that, but the smell was rancid. I scooped about 4 handfulls out of the good part to mix into the soon to be Zuchini bed and the rest got mixed into the pile of grass. Hopefully it will do some good in there to get the composting going.

Give it a couple of months, to let me lick my wounds and clear out my nostrils and I may have another go.

I’ve just been put onto the web app Twitter by a friend of mine.
You can keep track of what’s going on in the widget on the right hand side, or you can follow me on Twitter.com

You’ll also notice that I’ve put the About Me bar on the side, along with some Site Stat’s.

While we’re in the mood for clicking, Sign up for updates for this blog!

I think *and hope* that when it comes to picking time, the separated lettuces have performed better than their sardine like cousins who are squished in together.

Having all good intentions of making loads of compost, I started dumping the lawn clippings into a heap at one end. This has now turned into a huge pile of grass clippings (not compost). Today I spread it all out and have began watering it and will add some horse manure to it and stir it up a little to kill the little weed seeds that are living in there.

So now it’s onto the contents. I’ve got 6 cabbages that have began to head up nicely. There are three tomato’s, some very small spring onions, some Pak Choy, lettuces, a couple of Chinese broccoli and one pumpkin.

Over the summer time there will be a shade house erected to protect them all from the 40+ degree (Celsius) days.

Underneath the straw (kinda hard to see) is about 15 dwarf snap beans, more spring onions, spinach, coriander, lettuce and some baby carrots.

Now that it’s almost done, I can shower, go to the toilet, and most importantly get back to blogging here. Photo’s to follow when the product it completely done.

It has been fantastic to have my father and one of our family friends come up and stay with us to do the job. What we’re spending in time we’re saving twice that in labor costs. All we have to do is provide food, bed and beer to keep these workers happy.

Day 1 was destruction.
Day 2 was cleanup and trips to the dump.
Day 3 saw construction of the raised floor.
Day 4 was more floor and some plumbing.
Day 5 (Sunday) was a day of rest, sight seeing and bbq at the lake.
Day 6 has seen the plumbing finished and the walls taking shape…

I hope that we’ll have the rest of the walls up and the shower fitted on day 7, ready for tiling on day 8.

From top Left to bottom Right.
Before destruction, After Destruction, Maggie the Cat inspecting, Feeding the peacock at the lake.