My friend the neophyte gardener goes to Home Depot and Lowe's two or three times a week. She and her husband are busy buying landscape edging, concrete blocks, trellises, fencing, and anything else they can still find in stock to finish up the hardscape on their first-year garden. She's always looking for bargains and so when she told me this fountain at Lowe's had been marked down to $29 I had to stop by and see for myself. It was pretty cute but maybe not my first choice for a wall fountain. But at $29 I couldn't pass it up. Plus it was the last one left. And since I'd had an earlier failure with a "water feature" this seemed like a good buy and a boost to my end-of-summer doldrums. I didn't have a really good place to put it because my back porch is crammed with a mish-mosh of assorted stuff, none of which goes together and it all takes up a lot of room. So I removed a wooden shelf and slapped the fountain onto the wall. Instant ambience! I spent most of the weekend on the porch so I could listen to the sound of the water and pretend like it was still summer, even though I was shivering most of the time.
Earlier in the season I'd purchased a solar fountain to put in my miniscule pond to help aerate the water. Since I quit buying goldfish (otherwise known as raccoon hors d'euvres) the water tends to get a little yucky. But it seems I grossly underestimated the amount of sunlight that area receives. The solar panel doesn't store energy, it works only when the sun is shining directly on it. So when I'd leave for work, no bubbling fountain. When I got home from work, no jet of water. It became a weekend fountain, and even at that, I had to keep moving the solar panel to catch the direct rays. I felt like a sunflower constantly turning my face to follow the sun. It didn't help that the raccoons threw the darn thing out of the pond each night and I had to keep resetting it. So being the lazy gardener that I am I finally gave up on it. My new fall fountain seems to be just the thing I needed. But I am careful to turn it off at night. I have visions of raccoons swarming over it washing their food while I sleep and then me coming out in the morning to find it all in a heap on the patio floor. This may happen anyway, but I won't tempt them.
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My friend the neophyte gardener goes to Home Depot and Lowe's two or three times a week. She and her husband are busy buying landscape edging, concrete blocks, trellises, fencing, and anything else they can still find in stock to finish up the hardscape on their first-year garden. She's always looking for bargains and so when she told me this fountain at Lowe's had been marked down to $29 I had to stop by and see for myself. It was pretty cute but maybe not my first choice for a wall fountain. But at $29 I couldn't pass it up. Plus it was the last one left. And since I'd had an earlier failure with a "water feature" this seemed like a good buy and a boost to my end-of-summer doldrums. I didn't have a really good place to put it because my back porch is crammed with a mish-mosh of assorted stuff, none of which goes together and it all takes up a lot of room. So I removed a wooden shelf and slapped the fountain onto the wall. Instant ambience! I spent most of the weekend on the porch so I could listen to the sound of the water and pretend like it was still summer, even though I was shivering most of the time._resize.5.jpg)
Earlier in the season I'd purchased a solar fountain to put in my miniscule pond to help aerate the water. Since I quit buying goldfish (otherwise known as raccoon hors d'euvres) the water tends to get a little yucky. But it seems I grossly underestimated the amount of sunlight that area receives. The solar panel doesn't store energy, it works only when the sun is shining directly on it. So when I'd leave for work, no bubbling fountain. When I got home from work, no jet of water. It became a weekend fountain, and even at that, I had to keep moving the solar panel to catch the direct rays. I felt like a sunflower constantly turning my face to follow the sun. It didn't help that the raccoons threw the darn thing out of the pond each night and I had to keep resetting it. So being the lazy gardener that I am I finally gave up on it. My new fall fountain seems to be just the thing I needed. But I am careful to turn it off at night. I have visions of raccoons swarming over it washing their food while I sleep and then me coming out in the morning to find it all in a heap on the patio floor. This may happen anyway, but I won't tempt them.
