I’m not much of a handyman, but I just installed an automatic window box & flower pot watering system in front of our house. Our flowers are exploding!

Before I retired, I imagined getting a part-time job at Walt Disney World watering the flowers at one of their resorts in the morning. I met a guy who did exactly that at the Wilderness Lodge.

Still, over the last 10 years of actual early retirement, I’ve come to dread watering the flowers at our house in MN. My wife and I alternated every other day. Some days we’re happily “rained out”.

Since we’re on vacation now, I set up a system to water the flowers automatically. It’s a hose spigot electronic controller that opens/closes water to a long (60’) 1/4” tube with multiple misting nozzles on it. It runs for just 6 minutes in the early morning and another 6 minutes in the early evening.

I bought two of them on Amazon for $65 each. One for each side of our front doorstep. I have just 5 nozzles on each: 4 in the window boxes, and 1 on the big pots. 6 minutes is just long enough for all of it to start to overflow.

My wife loves the new set-up. It’s like magic when you hear them come on & shut off twice a day. Watering took us about 10-15 minutes a day by hose. That doesn’t seem like much, but it’s pretty boring & needs to be done constantly (about 150x per summer; 25-75 hours!).

The only issue I have had is with the rabbits. I buried most of the tubing under our landscaping rock, but some was left exposed under a shrub. The rabbits chewed a bunch of holes in it.

I replaced the damaged section and put a lot of rock on top of it now. I also put some shielding on the tubing that comes out of the rock and into the boxes and pots. Hopefully that will take care of it while we are gone.

For me, it’s fun to do a project like this now and then. Like I said, I’m no handyman, but retirement gives you time to putter around on ideas like these.

What projects are you doing around the house? Anything you’d suggest to others?

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