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If you’re hefting your garden hose from bed to bed and only concentrating on where the water’s going, you probably haven’t noticed the trail of destruction behind you — a trailing hose can be responsible for all kinds of damage, including ripping out newly planted seedlings, breaking branches of your precious bushes, and prematurely deadheading flowers. The solution? Crafting hose guards from simple household objects like flower pots, steel poles, door knobs, or even empty wine bottles.
Hose guards are stakes that you push into the soil at the edges of your garden beds. As you walk around your garden pulling your hose, they ensure it stays on the lawn or pathway rather than trailing across your planted areas. You can buy ready-made hose guards — prices range from dirt cheap for these functional Bylion plastic guide spikes on Amazon, to these heavy-duty aluminum hose guides at $19.99 for one, via Gardener’s Supply Company. Thankfully for our wallets, homemade hose guards are easy to DIY!
Get crafty
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Gardener Suburban Homestead shows how to make the hose guard in his YouTube post. Take two 4-inch ceramic flower pots with large drainage holes and a 12-inch galvanized steel pole. Place one pot upside down on the soil in your flower bed or the edge of your lawn, and the other pot right-side up on top of that. Then, use a rubber mallet to hammer the pole through the drainage holes into the soil, and that’s it.
Another fancier option is to use drawer pulls as attractive hose guard toppers with copper piping. Select your drawer pulls for their decorative charm. Cut a half-inch copper pipe to your desired length, drill holes in half-inch copper pipe end caps, and thread the pulls through the hole. Coat all the guides with an outdoor sealant for greater durability, and they’re ready to use.
Blogger Manuela at A Cultivated Nest made hose guards with some cute doorknobs. Take the doorknob of your choice to the hardware store and ask for some threaded steel rods to fit — around 20-inch lengths. Then, screw the knobs onto one end of the rods and bang them into the ground. Alternatively, if you drink a lot of wine, you can turn those empty bottles upside down and push them into the soil at the borders of your beds for instant hose guides.
