Garden Hose Tips to Make Your Chores Easier This Season

Why work harder than you have to? When the temperatures spike into the red, the last thing you want to be doing is dragging a heavy garden hose from one end of your property to another. If you take the time to get the right garden hose and garden hose accessories, you won’t have to. In fact, the right garden hose selections could make your whole summer a lot easier. Check out these tips from an experienced gardener to find out how choosing the right hose and using it efficiently can help you get your chores done more quickly so you can enjoy your garden more and work in it less.

Multiple Hoses on One Faucet

Do you need to take your hose in multiple directions? If your gardening chores take you from the front yard to the back yard and around the side of the house to the driveway, consider using more than one hose. A multi-faucet manifold lets you hook up more than one garden hose to your outdoor faucet at the same time, so you can hook up the 50-foot 3/4 inch garden hose for watering the garden and the 25-foot 1/2 inch garden hose for watering the front lawn without having to swap them out each time – and without having to push your water through an extra 50 feet to get it where you want it to go.

One caveat: if you use more than one hose at a time, you’ll be splitting the water pressure among them. In most cases, you won’t be using them all at once, though – it’s just handy to have the best kind of garden hose for each task without having to spend half your morning unscrewing the hose from the faucet.

Start with a High Quality Hose

Most gardeners would be surprised if they added up all the time they spend wrestling with a garden hose. Cheap garden hoses are more likely to kink, crimp and knot. They’re also more likely to split and leak. The cheap garden hose that seemed like such a great deal in the aisle of the home improvement store could end up costing you a lot more over time. A high quality garden hose is more resistant to kinking, won’t knot and will last years longer than a cheap department store hose.

Pick the Garden Hose You Need

There are all sorts of specialty garden hose choices on the market. Among the most useful and universal – a drinking safe garden hose. You won’t have to worry about lead or chemicals in your kids’ swimming pool or your fresh salad.

Do You Suffer from Garden Hose Frustration?

Garden hose frustration – it’s a malady known to any gardener or home handyperson who has had to wrestle with a recalcitrant garden hose. If you’ve ever fought a heavy hose, dragged it over and around your yard, cursed it when it insinuated itself around your ankles – or worse, under the blades of your lawnmower – you know exactly what I mean. It’s also a malady with a sure cure – the right garden hose will cure you of it for years to come. Finding the best garden hose, however, can be a little trickier. Here’s what you should know when choosing a new garden hose.

Polyurethane – The Best Material for Your Garden Hose

In past years, the cheapest garden hoses were made – are still made, really – of PVC. It’s heavy, and it leaches chemicals into water that sits in the hose for any length of time. That can be a major concern if you drink from the water hose in your garden – and before you say you’d never do that, think again. Do you fill children’s swimming pools from the garden hose? How much of that water do you think your kids’ are swallowing? Do you water your vegetable garden with your garden hose? That water is leaving chemicals and other contaminants, including lead, on your tomatoes and green beans  -- and while that can be washed off, it’s not as easy to wash lead and other contaminants out of your garden soil, where it gets taken up by the good you’re growing.

So what’s the solution? Check out the newest lines of polyurethane garden hoses. Polyurethane is lightweight and pliable. It doesn’t require the chemicals and heavy leads used to cure PVC, thus there are no chemicals to leach into your drinking water. It doesn’t kink easily, making it far easier to maneuver around your yard. The biggest drawback of a polyurethane garden hose is that it’s usually more expensive than a cheap PVC hose. Even there, though, you’ll usually come out ahead. Because polyurethane doesn’t bake or freeze and is impervious to the UV rays of the sun, a polyurethane garden hose will last you for years longer than a standard PVC hose. When you factor in the multiple replacements you’d need to last as long as a PVC drinking safe garden hose, you’ll find that a polyurethane garden hose is a bargain.

This year, say goodbye to garden hose frustration. Shop online to find the right garden hose for your needs and live in harmony with the hose.