No Rain

Another day of predicted rain that didn't fall.    1.5" of rain in 6 weeks, and that was mostly 6 weeks ago.

I support some shrubs with a 5 gallon bucket with a small hole drilled in the bottom.  It drips slowly out and gets down into the root zone.  Very little wasted water that way.  It's for their survival, not thriving.  

The front yard tree looks wilted and the grass is brown.  It is too early for the grass to go dormant, so I think I will have to water it deeply.  I don't like to do that, but it seems necessary.  And it will be for a couple of hours.  Most people water their lawns shallowly, which brings the roots to the surface, which causes the roots to dry out faster.  Deep watering, when you have to do it, encourages them deeper.

I do a cat food can test.  Set an can out on the lawn where the sprinkler hits.  When it is filled, you gave the lawn  1" of water.  It needs that much per week.

Random Stuff

 There is always some random stuff going on.  Some normal but some not.  So a list:

1.  I solved the wristwatch problem.  It's hard to find a wristwatch that is both simple and readable.  I bought one that had a large display that was  easily readable.  But of course it came with features I didn't want.  I don't need a wristwatch with alarm settings, hourly beepings, or countdown or uptime timers.  But every manufacturer assume that I do.

When I received it, every feature was functioning except the actual time.  So I set the time according to the instructions.  That wasn't too difficult.  But a "chronometer" function beeped every hour.  And an alarm went off at Noon every day for 60 seconds.  Drove me crazy.

It is a foreign product, as most small devices are today.  The instructions can be hard to understand sometimes.  The watch has 4 buttons (A to D).  The instructions tell you which order to press them to turn on and off various features.  I tried to follow them for 2 weeks with no success!

The features are tiny little abbreviations in a corner of the watch, and I couldn't even read them with my reading glasses.  It took a magnifying glass (the kind you can wear on your head so both hands are free) to see the letters. 

I know how to follow instructions.  These were like "press B 2 seconds then press C to access "chronometer" and make adjustments as purposed".  Yeah, that's a quote.  I could never get the hourly single beep or 60 second beeps to stop.

Finally, after trying again and failing, I just started pressing the 4 buttons randomly in anger.  And it worked!

The chronometer and alarm were both off.  I have been delighted with the watch since then.  It shows me the time and date in a relatively clear display, and that is all I wanted from it.  I hope it lasts the rest of my life (batteries to be replaced of course) so that I don't have to struggle with settings again.

2.  It has been unusually dry here for months.  Here it is not yet even Summer and the lawn grass is fading and the soil is hard.  We normally have 17" of rain for the year by now and it is just 8" and nearly nothing for 2 months..  I know, things are worse elsewhere, but this is my yard and my plants.  

So I decided to actually water the lawn.  I don't normally do that.  I'm organic, and I accept that grass goes dormant in Summer.  But it isn't even Summer yet.  The WEEDS are even dying.  

So I took out my old lawn sprinkler to at least save the new meadow bed.  It leaked like crazy!  I allowed it because I have a lot of established plants in there and 36 more to add very soon.  But I needed a new one.  I looked up some garden sites about recommendations.  No sites agreed about the best.  So they are probably sort of either all crummy or all good.  I ordered one.  It will arrive Saturday.  At least (being new) it will probably work well for a couple of years.  So many things are just built poorly these day.

3.  The cold nights (and odd tiredness) caused me to delay planting my heirloom tomatoes.  I had too many 40's nights in May and that stunts them.  And after no rain for nearly a month, I can't barely get a shovel in the soil.  So I soaked the soil for an hour.  Tomorrow I can dig good holes and add good organic fertilizer in the soil before I fill it back in around the transplants. 

4.  I mowed the daffodil bed.  They had all died back sufficiently.  And I will spread mostly P and K fertilizer around to feed the bulbs.  Then cover it with black mesh landscaping fabric to smother the grasses and weeds that tried to take over earlier this Spring.  By next Spring, there won't be a living weed or grass in the bed!

5.  Given the failure of the old oscillating lawn sprinkler and until a new one arrives in a few days, I will be setting out some buckets near special plants.  I have some with small holes in the bottom. That allows the water to drip out slowly and get down to shrub and tree roots.  

Stuff

Today is my 69th Birthday.  Whoppee...  NEXT YEAR I will feel officially old.  I got a nice card from my Sister.  They are usually humorous, and I love those.  This one was kind of serious about appreciating a Big Brother.  That was nice too.  My Sister and I have always been close.

But I mostly enjoyed the day planting some flowers.  Not the mass yearly annual plantings of zinnias and salvia and marigolds (those are the rest of the week as I had to soak the soil today so I can pull weeds out tomorrow).  These were specialty flowers for the hummingbird/butterfly/bee bed.

Last year, I bought seeds of less-common flowers that were self-seeding for a cottage garden bed.  But I didn't plant them and the places they were to go were too over-run with weeds (and poison ivy and invasive vines).  So I planted lots of them this year, intending to clear those areas.  I didn't.

But I had tilled up the hummers/butterflies/bees (HBB) bed (it grew few flowers last year).  So I looked up the flowers and found that most of them were very attractive to the HBB bed.  So I spent the day repurposing the seedlings planting those. 

It made sense.  The commercial HBB seed packets haven't worked 2 years in a row; time to try something different.  But I HAD spread a commercial mix around the bed and there were plants coming up.

So I had to stand in the beds VERY carefully to plant the seedlings and bend around so as to not move my seedling-stomping feet.  I planted 4 Cleomes, 4 Cosmos, 9 Maltese Cross, 5 Butterfly Weed (Asclepus or something like that), and 4 of one that I forget.  And, of course, I have hopes for the seedlings that are emerging from the HBB packet.  I know some are weeds and I tried to pick them out while planting the good flowers.  I gave them a good watering.

My back is KILLING me.  That used to happen a few times a year before but it is becoming a daily annoyance.  Aspercreme helps a lot.  The heated waterbed helps at night, too.  The more common problem is hand-clenches.  If I grip things too long too hard (like mower steering wheel or loppers or pruner handles) I pay for it 2 hours later.  My fingers clench up just when I'm preparing dinner and (aside for being painful) it is really awkward.  I do a lot of fresh food prep, so when I can't hold a knife firmly, I have to be REAL careful.

While I was planting the seedlings, I was watering the weeded parts of the older garden.  I have a sprayer mounted on a tripod I built years ago and that is really good for watering a defined area for 15-20 minutes to really soak the soil down to root level.

But there is good news.  I harvested snow peas. I love those in stir fries and I get to pick them when they are fresh and tender.

Planted 15 sunflower seedlings too.  I placed 5 each around three 2' high cages for support while they adjust to sunlight and the real world.  Helps them in windy conditions too. Support 2' high is better than none.

There is also good news in the backyard where the brambles used to grow rampantly.  The brush mower really killed most of them last Fall.  Individual wild blackberries succumb to a small controlled shot of RoundUp.  I don't like that kind of stuff, but things got out of hand and I've been very specific about what I sprayed.  It is nice to see a 1' high blackberry shoot falling over.  I've targeted wild grape vines and poison ivy too.

The wild english ivy is harder to kill  and takes a couple shots.  I finally identified the invasive vine from a neighbor's yard as Vinca Major.  It is hard to kill, too.  Mowing it and then spraying the new growth seems to work well.  But it will be several attacks before it is dead in the open areas.

The hard part is that the Vinca and poison ivy have slowly infiltrated my old fence flowerbed.  I can't spray there as there are still good perennial plants.  THAT is either going to be slow careful "dig out one weed at a time" or try to dig out the plants I want to save, move them temporarily, and kill the whole area for the year.  RoundUp degrades in 3 months, so I could re-establish the plants I save (and there aren't all that many left) in late Fall.

There are shrubs along the fence and I can't move THOSE, but I was planning to cut them down anyway as they are really too large.  So my plan for those is to take new-growth stem-cuttings, dip them in a rooting hormone, and set them in 4" pots to regrow.  I have some ideas of where I can plant some along the fence in the far backyard where they are welcome to grow large, some along the drainage easement (fake creek), and some polite ones (nandina) along the edge of the front yard to make a border.

And I had a nice discovery!  In the backyard, there was a bramble plant that that I thought was wild blackberrybut it had a slightky different flower and a nice scent.  I did some research and discovered it was an old wild rose I think is called 'Hawthorne Rose'.  It was a casualty of the "clearing of the wild brambles". 



But last week, I noticed what appeared to be wild blackberry flowers growing up through a Burning Bush and went to get the loppers to cut it out of the shrub.  But then I was thrilled to smell the scent!  It was a volunteer of the Hawthorne Rose I had lost...  I will take a few dozen cuttings of it hoping some will grow.  Meanwhile, the Rose and the Burning Bush will live intertwined for a year.  I don't want to risk losing it again.

Back to the wild blackberries...  Looking over the fence in all directions, it seems that my yard is the only one with wild blackberries in it.  I recall that there was a single patch in a corner of the front yard when I moved here.  It must have spread from there.  I love rasperries.  I mention that because wild blackberries carry a virus that doesn't harm them much but it is death to rasperries with a about 200'.  So If I can kill off the wild blackberries, I can grow raspberries again.  I'd like that!

That's enough for today.  I'm going to feed the cats, clean the litter boxes for the night, and haul my weary back into bed...

A Better Day

So the cement held on the pvc pipe repair.  And I pulled on it hard.  Good.  Now I just have to straighten and reinstall 2 others.

I plan to add more supports so that (hopefully) this doesn't happen again.  As best I can guess, enogh leaves fell on the chicken wire covering that the large snowflakes that fell didn't fall through it and accumulated enough weight to bend even the metal pipes in the pvc pipes.  I'll have to be careful about that in the future.

I built the structure with metal pipe inside pvc pipe because there were some complicated connections and metal pipes didn't offer those and pvc pipes did.

I still have some pipes to straighten.  But now that I've done the worst-bent one, the rest should be a BIT easier.  Not "easy" but "easier".  Part of the problem with the first one was that the temperature outside was close to the minimum 45F that the cement cures at rapidly.  The next couple days are supposed to reach the 70F mark (yay Spring) so I can do better with the other bent pipes.

So of course I wasn't sitting around just waiting for the temperature to rise.  I had planned for the brambles in the back 1/4th of the yard to be gone in Fall 2017, but the one guy I found who said he could do that THEN ended up in the hospital from a job injury (and decided to retire).  I did it myself last Fall (really brambly awkward work).  But I did it.

I had to do it.  I had 5 saplings to plant that I bought in Fall 2017 and had set in my garden "temporarily", LOL!  I went out to dig holes for them in Winter and it was like digging a hole in ice.  So I moved 4 of them Tuesday.  At least I could dig the soil.  I transplanted them carefully.  I LOVE my solid steel spade!  I sharpened the edge and it cuts through all soil and vine roots well. 

Today, I took 4 kitty litter buckets (I save them) and drilled a tiny hole in the bottom of each.  Why?  Well, when I fill them from the hose, they drip water slowly into the soil.  It soaks in rather than run off that way.  And I don't have to stand around 30 minutes soaking the area.  Plus, the buckets remind me where the saplings are so I won't mistake them for the junk saplings that spring up on their own.

More to do in the days to come of course, but that was a good start!

TOMATOES!

I got a dozen all at once.  Brandywine, Cherokee Purple, Pinapple, and Ponderosa Pink.

I ate one at lunch, one at dinner, one the next lunch and another the next dinner...

Heavenly.

They aren't pretty.  But they sure beat anything at the stores and farmers market.  And I already have more this year than all of last year!

The red plastic may have helped (no splashing up of soil-bourne fungals).  The waterbottles may have helped.  Large soda bottles screwed into plastic spikes that delivered water several inches underground slowly.  Into which I dropped slow-release organic fertilizer pellets to dissolve with each filling of the bottles.  And maybe lack of rain so I controlled the watering each week.

But for whatever reason, this is seeming to be a good tomato year here.

Good and Bad Day

Discovered I could transact business with my far away credit union through a different local one.  They call it Credit-Union-Sharing (real original, right?).  But it beats driving an hour and back.

Picked 22 ripe cherry tomatoes and 3 large heirloom tomatoes in the garden. YUM!

Raked 10 piles of rocks out of the new leveled backyard.  Not sure what I will DO with the rocks yet.  But they have to go before I can plant anything there.  And I have a cool tool for raking rocks.  Get ready for the name - Rock Raker!  Maybe "Stoned Today, Gone Tomorrow"?


Actually, it works.  The front tines are curved slightly backwards, so it catches rocks and lets soil slide through.  I suspect some clam-digger adapted it to New England farming.

Fired up the charcoal offset smoker.  Cooked pork ribs and chicken.  The ribs are delicious; I'll have some chicken tomorrow.  And I have enough leftovers for 10 more meals.  Those hickory chunks make great smoke and flavor.

Watered the flowerbeds.  We aren't technically in a drought, but the recently-removed ridge soil was dry as dust 4' down and that's not good.  We we forecast "heavy rain" Thursday/Friday, but I got less than 1/4".  That doesn't even register on plants.  In fact, it's bad for them.  It encourages the roots upwards, where they dry out faster.

So I try to water deeply once a week.  We aren't low on water supply here (for the hoses), just not much rain  and lots of plants transpiring it from the soil even deep down.  Its the lack of water deep in the soil that worries me.

Watering is easy.  I have this thing I built...

 I bought 2 plants that I want more of.  One is a Knock-Off Rose and the other is a dwarf butterfly bush.  I hate buying plants that cost $25 in a 3" pot!  But I know how to take cuttings and root them.  So each of those plants will be 5 plants at least next Spring.

Call me cheap, but its the fun of doing the rootings I like...

And the cats are loving being outside.  Marley misses his mousies (destroyed when the ridge was leveled) but he accepts my promise that the new plantings will probably bring even more mousies around and he will have more hiding places.

I better deliver on that promise...

Busy Day

It was unusually nice weather today (partly cloudy, dry, 30% humidity and 80F).  I won't see many of those again until September.  So I was up early, for me;  10:30 AM.  I know many of you cringe to think of that as "early",   but an advantage of being single and retired is setting your own hours.

So I started the day with an English Muffin and a cheese/bacon/bell pepper omelet, a glass of green tea, and a glass of V8.  I've been cooking for so long now that all my cast iron pans are utterly non-stick.  They are wonderful!

Fed The Mews first, of course.  AND after.  When they haven't eaten for 10 hours (because I've been in bed), they need a 2nd breakfast.  I'd just give them more at first, but Iza can't keep it down all at once.  And normally, I would let them out afterwards, but it was lawn-mowing day.

So I went out and mowed the lawn.  Takes about an hour for mowing and 30 minutes trimming with the new string-trimmer.  There are a lot of places I just can't mow closely, so I finally bought one of those new 18 volt lithium battery trimmers and it works GREAT!  When they say "it's like a gas one", they are darn close!  I need to get a shoulder strap though; its not one of those little 2 lb jobs...

I let The Mews out after the mowing was done and the fence gates were shut...

After that, I decided to attack some of the brambles that have been invading the more civilized part of by back yard.  My "poacher's shovel" is great for that (think of an industrial-strength 18" trowel on a shovel handle).  I need the narrow blade because the brambles are among plantings.  I got about a dozen dug up.

Then I needed to do some watering.  All you sufferring from drought, forgive me, but we have had unusually frequent rain here and I almost didn't notice we had finally gone a week without any rain.  I started the watering because the annuals I still have in pots looked a bit wilted.  And once I get a hose in my hand, EVERYTHING gets watered, LOL!

Not that I water everything by hand.  I have a tripod with a fan-nozzle attached that I build a few years ago.

This original had a shower spray nozzle, I replaced it with one that spreads more sideways.  I use the shower head nozzle for hand-watering now.

And then I had to water the enclosed veggie garden.  I'm not used to the tight spaces yet, so it is a bit awkward.  I'll get the tricks for worked out this year.  Watering the 6 new raised beds takes a good 30 minutes.

And THEN I had to water all the deck containers.  I tried just filling and re-filling a watering can to water them, but that got pretty tedious.  I thought I would try either one of those super limp hoses that collapse back into a small container, or one of those coiled types that stretch out and fit back in a metal holder.  You've seen them on ads. 

But I was at a D-I-Y store and I noticed they were using the coiled type themselves.  So I figured they probably have some experience with their products, and bought the Melnor green coiled one.

So far, it is working very nicely and sure doesn't take up much space.  I screwed the wire frame to a piece of exterior plywood and attached the plywood to the side of the deck.  A short hose reaches to the multi-outlet water outlet.

For the record, I use one outlet for the hose to the deck, one for the hose to the nearby lawn, one to an industrial strength hose that goes 150' to the back veggie garden, and one for a jet nozzle right at the spigot that is useful for many things (cleaning buckets, hands, boots,  etc).  Dragging hoses all around the yard is both difficult and damaging to plants (I have the entire area around the spigot planted).

So I came back in at 6 PM and decided about dinner.  I decided I'd earned a steak.  I buy them in bulk from the local meat store, cut them in half, and freeze them in sandwich bags (wrapped in a bigger bag, wrapped in a heavier bag - no freezer burn).  So I stuck one bag in a pan of hot water (gentle thawing), made a nice home-grown tomato salad (with some minced onion, chopped cucumber, and shaved carrot), sauted some wedges of red and green bell pepper, M/Vd a potatoe, and poured a glass of wine while I sauteed the steak (its more stovetop-roasting in the covered cast iron pan). 

Dessert was cut-up fresh fruits (cantalope, green grapes, a plum, a navel orange, and some prunes).

Life is good...

Now I need to consult with The Mews about what they want to post for tomorrow. 

Main Annual Bed

Finally got THAT done!  I was very pleased with the clearance sale orange zinnias I found at Walmart last year that I decided to plant zinnias myself this year.  But I found 2 I liked so I decided to make a pattern with both rather than just 1 big block.  One solid orange, and one mostly white with some slight pink stripes.  I'm calling it the Marley Bed (orange and white, get it?).

Since I came out with 27 each out of 36 seeds planted.  But what pattern of planting?  Well, I could have done "half and half", "alternating rows", or "every other one", but making dots on paper I realized I could make all the outside ones orange and all the inner ones white.  Well, that seemed different, so I went with that.

Now, planting things in a pattern can be tricky, so I made a measuring stick to help.  I found a 1"x2"x6' board and marked one side with 12" measurements and the other side with 9" measurements (actually, it was so useful I am going to mark the other 2 sides in 6" and 10" measurements).

I had eyeballed the general area of the bed.  It's wider at the back than the front.  And my eyeball measurements weren't perfect, so I had to adjust slightly.  With the measuring stick, I realized it was a bit wider at the back than I thought, so instead of perfect 9" spacing between plants, I used 12" spacing along the rows and 9" spacing between the rows.

Here is the before picture.

7' wide at the back, 5' wide at the front, and 6' deep.  Interesting geometric space to lay out.  I dug the soil up with my leverage fork, broke up all the soil clumps bigger (by hand) than a pingpong ball, and lifted out all the weeds.  Then raked as best I could.  Tossed the small rocks to the fence...  You can see a bit of soaker hose in the picture.  I pulled it all loose and set it aside.  I'll put it back in place next year.

And started planting.  The measurement stick really helped!  I use a bulb planterto make the holes for the seedlings. then add some fine topsoil to encourage root expansion and set the seedlings on that after loosening some of the roots.  Then add more fine soil to fill the hole.

 

But this year, using the measuring stick, I was able to plug out all the holes for a whole row at once.  Much better spacing than eyeballing it!  No matter how many years I go planting, I always learn something new each year.  I'll probably be getting it just about right by the time I die.

I didn't take pictures as I went (when you are "in the zone" you don't want to stop), but here is the completed bed.

Not all the seedlings had flowers, so I had to be careful to leave one flowering plant in each 6-pack as I went along so I could tell the color on the flowers remaining.

I ended up with one each orange and white zinnia at the end.  I'll put them in a container with the other orphans (I have salvia and forget-me-nots too).

I set up my new tripod-waterer after I was done planting.  The soil was dry as dust!  The previous tripod waterer had a shower wand on it, but I discovered last year that a fan waterer was better (wider area with less depth works better than circles for my beds).

I made a temporary try last year, and it was much more effecient at watering.  So I gave the back half 10 full minutes of full power watering, then 10 full minutes at the front half.  A lot easier with the fan spray as opposed to the round shower spray wand.

This may sound odd, but I will be cutting off all the flowers tomorrow.  I needed them to know which seedlings to plant for the pattern, but with the flowers cut off, more energy will go to the rrot development and the plants will send out more stems to become busier and grow MORE flowers in just a few weeks. 

I'll be sending more pictures of THAT!

Good Gardening Days

Some days, you just cant seem to get any useful work done.  You vacuum and it just looks the same a day later.  There are always dishes and pots to clean.

But outside, the effort of work seems to last longer.  I spent some time watering the gardens the past several days.  I have a tripod I built (my own design) that lets me just set the hose spray on and let it run for 10 minutes at a spot.  Its easy to move to a new spot to water.

It takes 5 movements of the sprayer to do the flowerbeds, 3 to do the veggie gardens, and 3 to do the hosta bed.  Plus random local watering for the odd places too small to water largely.  Which usually means 120 minutes or 2 hours.

But September has actually had virtually no rain, so I gave each spot 20 minutes of watering instead of just 10 and spent the time waiting by weeding the watered flowerbeds.  I pulled out 3 wheelbarrow-loads of weeds.  Fortunately, them being deeply soaked, they came out with the roots.  There is something very satisfying about seein a weed pulled up with the roots still on!  Even if they survive, they are annual weeds and won't have time to grow again to produce seeds.  So THEY are GONE GONE GONE!

It was a very good 2 days.

Garden Watering Stand

I like to keep the garden watered, but it's boring.  It's wasteful to use an oscillating sprinkler on the raised veggie beds because of the walkways between them, and the flowerbeds are too narrow for one.  It is too boring to just stand there and water all the beds by hand.  I have drip irrigation hoses, but they all broke off at the raised brass couplings under the weight of the snow 2 winters ago (haven't quite figured out how to repair them).

I had developed a rather convenient way to water them all a patch at a time using a fat hose nozzle and a spading fork.  I stabbed the fork in the ground abut 10' away and nestled the fat hose nozzle (shower setting) in the fork's D handle.  But that required getting the garden fork firmly in the ground at each 6' section or raised bed.  Naturally, if I needed to water the beds, the lawn soil was rather hard to penetrate with the fork.

I needed a better way.  My first thought was a pole with a clamp on top and a flat "X" at the bottom with spikes to "step" into the lawn.  I couldn't find any parts like that, and I'm not a welder.  Then I looked at my camera tripod.  It looked a bit flimsy, needed some kind of attachment at the top, and I wasn't sure how waterproof it was.  But a tripod seemed the way to go.

I built one using pressure treated wood and stainless steel hardware.  The PT wood is 2x2"deck balusters. The tripod is designed with 1 forward and 2 back legs.  It is 2 back legs to resist the backwards force of the water and the weight of the hose.

The balusters come with pointed ends.  I wanted the points for the bottoms, but I wanted flat tops to attach a nozzle platform.  So I cut off the tops of each of the 3 balusters.  Then I cut 3" off the 2 back legs to use to widen the attachment surface.  Two pieces of scrap wood added some width.  It was all glued and screwed to the front leg.

Next, I used a tapering jig on the tablesaw to cut angles for the 2 back legs to attach to the front leg.  They are shorter because I used 3" to make the top attachment surfaces, but also because the front needs to be longer to create an upwards angle for the nozzle platform.  That will make more sense in the last pictures.  I can't give an exact angle for the cut (I really just overlayed one on the other and eyeballed the "right" spread).  It looks about 30 degrees though.

I needed to drill a hole through the 3 legs for an axle bolt.  I rigged up some stops and supports on my drill press for the 2 angled back legs.  The front leg just needed a spacer to account for the platform support.

It looks like this when the bolt and nut is put through all 3 legs.   This holds the legs all at the angles.  But I also wanted to be able to store it easily for the winter.  That meant being able to collapse it.  So I took the back legs back to the drill press and lifted them up slightly to angle the holes. 

I may not be explaining that well.  To store it, I wanted the 3 legs to compress flat to each other, and the lengthened hole allowed that.  And so that the bolthead and wing nut (for tightening securely on a flat surface, I used a forstener bit to make an angled hole the size of the flat washers.  I don't have a picture of that, but it will be obvious when/if you make one of these yourself.

Notes:  1, The washers between the legs were removed later.  I realized I DIDN'T want the legs to slide easily when being set up.  2,  The spacer washers below the wing nut are there because the wing nut catches on the wood before the bolt is tight.  3, Use a bolt with threads the whole length.  The bolts with about 1" of threads don't have enough thread length.

Here is the tripod in the storage position.  That's what I mean by "compressing flat" and why the back legs have elongated holes. 

Here is the tripod set up, minus the hose nozzle platform on top...  You can see that with the front leg longer, it creates an upwards angle.

Here is the finished tripod.  A piece of PT board is glued an screwed to the platform support on the front leg (the screws are countersunk under the wand nozzle).  Copper clamp-downs hold the wand in place with pan-head exterior screws.  A wand nozzle is much easier to attach than a standard nozzle.  The wand, BTW, has the most uniform spray of any nozzle I have ever tried.  This brand is Melcor; others may be just as good.

To relieve hose-weight pressure on the wand, I attached an angled  hose connector.  I have quick-connect attachments on all my hoses and attachments.

And here is the watering tripod in action!  Adjusting the angle of the front leg easily adjusts the angle of spray.

It's easy to move from spot to spot, stores nicely, and should last decades!