Many of us have a love-hate relationship with our hanging baskets.

On the one hand we adore the cascade of portable colour that we hang off our porches, decks or fences, and yet that colour comes at a price of constant watering. Forget to dispense the H2O just one day and that cascade of colour becomes a crispy brown eyesore.

Enter inventor Al Muxlow and business partner/salesman extraordinaire Harold Elzinger, both of whom are bringing the Basket Booster Self-Watering System to anxious hanging basket owners everywhere.

What is the Basket Booster Self-Watering System you ask? Simply put, it is an automatic watering valve fed by 1/8” poly tubing fitted to a reducer cap that can be threaded onto any standard hose fitting. The basket hangs on the watering valve that regulates flow depending on weight - a dry or light basket will receive more water, while a heavy basket might receive none.

There is no gimmick here; you don’t need batteries, a filter, a pressure regulator or a wad of cash. This is simply a low-tech watering system that won’t cost you a fortune or take hours to assemble.

I have had a demonstration model set-up at work in a very hot exposed site, and in three weeks, that basket has been perfectly watered with not a drop of moisture on the ground below. When I went to meet Al at Harold’s Maple Ridge home, I was able to see baskets and planters (the valve can also be used for planters) that had been on the system all summer and they were in pristine form.

This system operates with very little pressure, so it can even work on well water or with solar-powered pumps (Harold had one set up) for cottage applications.

Urban homeowners can simply attach the reducer cap to a two-way valve and using the supplied T-connections, can have up to 50 baskets or planters operating on a single line. You don’t even need to blow it out or bring it in for the winter, as the system is freeze-proof.

To find out where the Basket Booster Self-Watering System will be available, contact Harold at northco@telus.net.

From the Octopus’ Garden

Besides gardening, my other great passion in life is spending time in the ocean - snorkeling with sea turtles, manta rays, moray eels and the like.

So when Terra Nova introduced a new bellflower (Campanula punctata) called pink octopus, I was so intrigued that we grew a crop.

The result was anything but disappointing, with pendulous buds resembling Japanese lanterns bursting open to pink tentacle-like petals that spread wider with time. This easy-to-grow perennial is Zone 5 hardy, tolerates full to part sun, and shows very well in containers.

It flowers spring through midsummer and mature plants often bear upwards of 50 blooms at a time. Pink octopus tolerates a wide variety of soil types and bulks up rather quickly, with an average height of 30cm. This bellflower was only available on a limited basis this season, but should be found at most garden centres by spring 2010.

Meet Dracunculus

I was visiting the garden of Jack and Astrid Gunther when I came face to face with a beautiful specimen of one of my favourite plants, Dracunculus vulgaris. Also known as black arum, voodoo lily or dragonwort, the Latin name Dracunculus translates as ‘little dragon’, a reference to the long spadix that protrudes out of the huge maroon flowers.

The catch-22 here is that these same blooms smell like rotten meat or an outhouse (depending on your sense of smell) because flies are the pollinators.

This plant literally traps them for one day, during which time they crawl over the stigmas while covered with pollen, looking for a way out. As the spathe withers, it allows just enough room for the flies to escape and pollinate other flowers.

Growing 1-1.5m tall, Dracunculus has attractive tortoise-shell patterned stems and finely cut foliage with delicate white hash marks.

The plants are rarely available, but the tubers are often found in the summer bulb section with dahlias and such.

I should also mention that my photo of Jack and Astrid’s Dracunculus shows a collapsed flower that had been in prime form just the day before