Spring Front Porch Face Lift

Over the weekend, I took Brianna and Eli with me to run a few errands.  We stopped at a local nursery and were soon engrossed in conversation about drawing the beautiful flowers there.

I thought this one would be amazing done with watercolor pencils, with moisture pulled from the center out on the finished drawing.

Bri saw this one and immediately wanted to draw it with her new gel pens from Christmas.

We had a lot of fun wandering around, petting the grass, sniffing the herbs, and loading our cart with pretty plants for our porch.

Sadly, I'm not blessed with a green thumb, and our once lovely front porch has again fallen into a state of pathetic disarray.

Part of my problem is neighborhood cats who dig in my planters to do their business.  But another large part of my problem is that watering is a cumbersome chore and I'm not great about actually doing it.

When we got home, Brianna and I walked around, and I shared my vision for how things should look.  I pulled a few weeds, uprooted lots of dead plants, got out some supplies... and took a nap.

Brianna and her friends spent a good part of the afternoon doing the actual work.  Gotta love teens who will work for Peanut M&Ms!

Here is my old watering situation.  A big, heavy, bulky hose, that the children never coil up properly when I ask them to water for me.  Plus watering cans for the places the hose can't reach.

A photo posted by Shecki Bernard (@grtlyblesd) on Feb 5, 2016 at 6:16pm PST

I was sent this expandable garden hose for review purposes.  And I am crazy impressed with it.

I couldn't get the old hose off by myself, so I asked my big, strong, wrestler man-child to help me.  Once he saw what I was doing, he wanted in on the fun.  We were both in awe of the way the hose blew up to 4 times it's original size when filled with water.  If you've ever done the "snake" straw paper trick in a restaurant while waiting for your food to show up, it was a lot like that.  (If you haven't, you don't know what you're missing, and you'll instantly rack up the coolness points if you show it to your kids the next time you're out to eat.)

Then we had fun trying out all the different nozzle settings!  Spray, mist, center, flat...  There's a whole bunch of them.  My new favorite is angle, which is fabulous for hitting the one hanging plant that I haven't managed to kill yet.  I used to have to fill the little watering can and ask one of the kids to hop up onto the fence with it for me.

One of the things I like about this hose is that with our drought here in California, I can water the farthest away plants and then when I'm about 2/3 of the way through, I can turn off the water, and the hose continues to squirt as it shrinks back to it's original size!

You can see here, how straight the hose is, all puffed up with water.  It reaches all the places we need to water.  And it doesn't kink like typical hoses do.

You can see how much smaller it is than the old hose.

So much easier to keep neat and tidy.

I'm so glad spring is starting here in California.  Hopefully, with the help of this great hose, I'll be able to keep our front yard looking pretty.

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