A Flex-a-Spout on Your Downspout Just Might Save your Foundation

Amerimax Home Products Flex-a-Spout

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Your average homeowner learns to hate water, often within the first year of home ownership. When you aren’t fighting to keep the water within your pipes in the home's interior, you find yourself battling to keep other water away from where it doesn't belong on the home's exterior. That’s why a house or other building has gutters and downspouts: they direct the rainwater that lands on the roof away from the foundation, the farther the better. If too much water gets too close to the foundation in homes with a basement, it often causes moisture problems. If the building's on a slab, an uneven distribution of moisture around the perimeter may cause cracking, even damage all the way to the partial collapse of exterior walls. The flatter the land around your house, the farther away you want that water sent.

Anti-Siphon Devices: Keep Contaminated Water out of Your Water Supply

Lasco Brass Hose Bibb Vacuum Breaker

Gardening enthusiasts, here's one more oddball device you can add add to the list of items that A) you weren’t aware exist, and B) didn't know you probably need. Fact is, though, that if your home sits on a space that isn't level, you probably need a Lasco Hose Bibb Vacuum Breaker.

Why would you want a Vacuum Breaker?

Because of the siphon effect: if water in a garden hose is sitting higher than the hose’s connection to the water supply, the water’s weight will force it back through the hose and faucet, straight into the water lines. If a little rubber or vinyl taste in your drinking water doesn’t upset you, it’s your right. But if you’d rather not have dirty water contaminating your home’s water supply, a vacuum breaker is the simple, inexpensive anti-siphon solution. Even if you don’t run hoses uphill, you may still need a vacuum breaker if you often fill water features or other large reservoirs like an above-ground pool.

The Bird-X Prowler Owl is a Washout

Bird-X Prowler Owl Bird Deterrent

At first, we figured the holes showing up in all our tomatoes came courtesy of those damned squirrels who live in the oak trees hanging over the yard. We thought that until one day I saw a mockingbird land on a tomato cage and snack on a big ripe tomato. The next day found me at Wild Birds Unlimited looking at "bird deterrents." Besides all those phony-looking stationary owl statues, they sold a "decoy [that] resembles the ultimate, most-feared aerial predator; the Great Horned Owl, which catches and eats almost anything that moves." How could I resist? I shelled out 50 hard-earned smackers and took a Bird-X Prowler Owl home with me.

Manufacturer's Claims

Radishes: Easy to Grow, Tasty and Good For You!

Cherry Belle Radishes

For people making their first stab at gardening, radishes are just about the perfect plant. They’re easy to plant, hardy, and – above all – tasty. They’re great for getting kids interested in gardening, too: the seeds are big enough for little fingers to handle (unlike carrots or lettuce) and you get quick results, too. Most varieties poke up those first little leaves in six or seven days and even better, you can start eating your bounty in less than a month. Also great is that you can plant radishes, even the first of the season, while your tomato and pepper plants are still baby-sized.

That's a Radish? You're Kidding, Right?

Watermelon Radishes

When most of us hear the word “radish,” the mental image is of shiny scarlet globes with firm white flesh. Am I right? Well, not always: ever seen a watermelon radish? It doesn’t look like an ordinary radish from your local grocery, and it doesn’t taste like one, either. Both the color and taste lend variety to salads, although your kids might suspect that you’ve added beets. They’re also well-suited to those rare dishes calling for cooked radishes. 

These radishes are red and white like the more familiar variety, only backward: they come with a thick, tough whitish skin wrapped around crisp, deep reddish flesh. When still small, they are pretty "tangy"; not unlike the flavor of good horseradish. The taste mellows out as they reach their full of three to four inches in diameter. A hot growing season will tend to keep them somewhat on the small side. 

It’s Spring! and Time for Spading is Just Around the Corner

Truper 4-Time Spading Fork 

First-time gardeners with spading forks

We gardeners tend to spend those long winter nights cleaning and repairing our tools, drooling all over gardener porn (I mean those pretty pictures in seed catalogs, you dog!), and dreaming about the day the soil will finally be warm enough for planting. One of the tools you'll find me sharpening over the winter is my trusty Truper 4-Tine Spading Fork. This isn't Satan's pitchfork or the kind of fork you use to pitch hay to your horse, it's the kind that has a short handle topped by a big D.  A spading fork is how a gardener turns the soil in a garden bed each spring, and they’re also used for digging out root vegetables come fall. They can also be pressed into service for minor lawn aeration if needed. A fork won’t replace a shovel for turning over soil in a new bed, nor is this short-handled model up to mucking out a horse stall. 

Hoe, Hoe, Hoe: Merry Weeding!

Ames True Temper Warren Hoe

Spring’s arrival in farm country brings out the big guns: tractors as big as a house roam local fields hauling implements about the size of an airplane hangar. We normal humans find ourselves out in the yard tilling a patch of soil too small for one of those tractors to even enter. Size doesn’t matter in the backyard, because gardening is more than just growing food: it's "dirt therapy." As Canadian author Margaret Atwood says, "In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt." 

Gardeners come in two flavors: the ones who spend dark winter nights poring over seed catalogues and the ones who who spend dark winter nights tool department at the local hardware. I'm the second kind: it’s the hardware that “excites” me. The more esoteric, the better; and Warren hoes are sort of esoteric.