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?
Image: (c) MrFireStation.com
I am redoing three planters in the front of my house. One of the planters had Spanish Lavendar which had grown too big and woody with another flowering vine plant that took over and had smelly flowers. Planning to reboot the Lavendar and start trimming it correctly, and plant prostrate Rosemary as a companion plant to droop over the sides.
In the critical first five feet of the house, switch to Cuddly Cactus (upright without spines), Iris and a flowering sage plant to add more bang. Will be switching the mulch over to gravel. This is being done after observing what didn’t burn during the Palisades Fire.
Around 2020, I put in a Rachio Sprinkler Controller. Amazing technology and was practically free after a water department rebate. You program the system by describing the type of plants, root depth and type of watering system. You then connect the system to a nearby weather station on WunderGround. I have a nice Fire Department Weather Station around 300 yards from my house.
The controller is then programmed by letting their technology determine when your plants need water. Ironically their schedule is vastly different than the water department’s recommendation of short watering periods, with alternating days. Rachio waters for less frequent but longer intervals. The system is watering deeper into the ground and training your plants’ roots to grow deeper. The system waters more frequently when the weather is hot and dry and less when it is cold or raining, The end result of deploying this technology is that it dropped my annual water usage by 50% and my plants are happier.
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You Rachio system sounds much more sophisticated than what I set up. I don’t have an app or any sensors.
I’m sure water is much more expensive in California than it is in the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”.
Our total city water & sewer bills for all of 2025 only added up to $560. That includes running our irrigation across a half acre yard, 2x a week, 1 hour per zone, between mid-April thru late October.
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Your water is definitely cheap compared to ours. My total annual bill was $2,143 in 2021. After putting in the Rachio and letting it schedule the irrigation, the cost dropped to $1,184 and stayed about there for the next four years. This year, LA-DPW helped themselves to a hefty price increase, and I estimate I will hit $2,400 for 2026. Just the months of July and August which are the hottest and dryest months cost $583 for the bi-monthly bill.
A $4,800 return on a timer that cost $50 after the LA-DPW rebate is fantastic. I have 3,000 square feet of UC Verde Buffalo Grass and Mountain Tall Fescue and six Redwood Trees. The Redwood Trees are real water hogs. The Redwoods take the equivalent to watering a lawn in the area under their drip line. I have an acre and because of high water cost use Agave’s, Yucca’s, California Pepper Trees, California native Manzanita and leave a large meadow seasonal (burns during the summer), so the majority of the property gets no irrigation water.
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Wow – that’s quite a difference. Your water bill is >4x ours, despite your careful irrigation management and foliage selection.
I’m amazed to hear about your redwoods. I guess it only makes sense that a huge tree requires a lot of water. We’ve been to Muir Woods many times, but that is my only experience with redwoods. How tall / old are yours?
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I planted ours 32 years ago on the week of our wedding. They are around 55 feet tall.
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