Garden Gadgets

 

 Weeding the easy way wit Wundaweeder. Now all we have to do is wait for some sunshine.

Can you remember those heady days of old when gardening was the ‘in thing’? Every other programme on the telly had someone showing you how to grow the biggest petunias or how to make decking the size of an ocean liner. How things have changed over the last four years with the recession. In their place TV moguls now bombard us with food programmes with members of the public putting themselves under immense pressure to make sure that their soufflé’s don’t deflate before the judges can lick the spoon and give them a nod of approval. I could do that, but I will stick to gardening for now.

I suppose cooking is seen as a more cost effective pastime than gardening. Ideally the two could be combined so the calories are being burnt off in the pursuit of growing at least some of the vegetables used in the latest stir fry.

Garden supply companies haven’t given up though. In fact a lot of them are becoming more and more inventive to find things that we never knew we needed and couldn’t live without in the garden. Cost is a big factor now as no-one can get hold of money, so most new innovations have to be at a bargain price. Let’s have a look at some of the new innovations on the market for the wanting gardener that will hopefully last all season and not end up in the bin after being used once..

The Latest Garden Gadgets

Wild Grass Solar Garden Lights. You can jam the plastic grass into the ground and make it appear as if you have random tufts glowing in the dark. If you have any extra gullible friends you could always convince them that the grass is a special variety that glows every single night.

Suntracking Beach Chair. This folding beach chair is unique in a sense that it can swivel 360º, enabling you to always face the sun without having to go through the hassle of getting up and moving the chair to realign its direction. Lazy gardening at its best.

Heated Weed Eliminator Tool. This unique device will kill weeds at the root using heat, making it environmentally safe as you go about zapping weeds without the need for chemicals that could harm surrounding soil, groundwater, plants or wildlife.

Wunda Weeder. An Australian inventor has created a device that creeps along the garden and lets you be far more comfortable. It’s called the ‘Wunda Weeder’. The structure is solar powered and propels itself slowly through the garden. This allows for you to weed, plant and transplant rows of vegetables, flowers and herbs. Even the radio is solar powered. Thanks to that big solar panel that also means you’ll be laying in the shade as you scoot through the garden. Along the side of the trolley are spots to put seeding trays or buckets. These devices will be best suited to large scale operations as it’s not the sort of thing you could store in the shed. Check out the prototype on the wonderweeder.com website

GOAT. If you can’t afford a ride on mower, then how about a lawnmower scooter? The Lawn Mower Scooter has an electric motor that can drive the blades and scooter. That means that you can ride on it while the blades are doing the work. It can reach up to 6 kilometres per hour, and it can collect the cut grass in a container. There is even a transparent window so you can see inside and tell when it is time to be emptied. Don’t come crying to me if you fall off though.

Poop prints. Having two dogs like us makes it hard to detect which one has made a mess on the kitchen floor in the morning. Of course they both look guilty; it’s a trick dogs have learned throughout the years. Now we have a way of finding out who the culprit is, we now have PooPrints, a company that tracks down the offending pooper using genuine DNA technology. I like it!

First of all you need a sample to obtain the DNA, this is sent off and stored. When you need to find out which dog did the business, send off the offending poop and it will be tested against the sample until a match has been found. This takes 5 days so by the time it comes to reprimanding your dog they won’t have a clue what’s happening to them. This could be (and probably will be) taken up by local councils to track down offenders in parks and on pavements.

Robotic lawnmowers. There not new and there are lots on the market. Has anyone actually got one? If so let me know how is performs. Paying 2000 euro for one of these machines would be a big investment for anyone.