My Father loves his garden.
In the height of the summer months he spends 2 hours a night watering the various hanging baskets, planters, greenhouse cultivations, borders and grass.
His garden, although beautifully maintained, always stayed the same. He had the same hanging basket arrangements, same flowers in his planters and the same seeds and cuttings being cultivated.
As he approached retirement the trek from flower to faucet, to fill his watering can was becoming increasingly more difficult and time consuming.
So he installed an outside faucet and hose pipe. This removed the burden of carrying the watering can and also slightly reduced the time needed to irrigate the garden. He was happy.
I wasn't. You see my father's other love is to travel, and now he has retired he does this more frequently. This means after a long day at work, I spend some time with my kids and then I spend the rest of my short evenings hosing flowers. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the beauty of nature, but I don't yet appreciate all the effort required to maintain a nice looking garden.
So, I have recently helped my father to select and purchase an irrigation system. It took a few nights to fully install but from being a man who was happy with a hosepipe, my father is now ecstatic with his irrigation system. Furthermore it has a timer, so he can set as many different times and varying lengths for the irrigation to take place. I am happy to, when he goes away I just periodically check everything is doing what it should.
Now, having eliminated the pain of carrying a watering can and a considerable amount of time required to water, you might think my father's hobby has had the fun taken away from it. Wrong. It has injected a whole new concept of gardening for my father by allowing him to experiment with including all of God's botanical creations, of which I am told there are quite a lot. He now has the time to learn more, grow more variety, and plant different arrangements where previously he was happy with what he knew.
The next thing he wants to do is to integrate his rain water collection barrels into the irrigation system, just so he is environmentally 'green'.
Not my father's…but could be soon.
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