Gardeners from colder climates may be wondering what I'm doing with Wall O'Waters in my garden. While I don't need their much touted ability to keep plants from freezing at night, I do need the extra warmth, even during the day. My first years here, the long springs fooled me, because even though plants were safe from frosts and freezes from February on, there wasn't nearly enough warmth to grow plants like tomatoes and peppers. They wouldn't die, but neither would they thrive. Hence the Wall O'Waters!

Wall O'Waters are available from many catalogs and at some nurseries. You fill the tubes up with water which absorbs heat during the day and releases it at night. You can fill the tubes higher or lower depending on whether you want them to bend closed or stand open. The manufacturer used to recommend adding bleach to the tubes to keep algae growth down, but I don't do that since the time I managed to poison my carefully tended tomato plants by squeezing bleachy water on them when removing the Wall O'Waters. Oops! Now they have tinted them green and no longer suggest the bleach. Wonder if there's a connection. . . .

Oh, and there haven't actually been any Elvis sightings here. Sorry! Just a hedgehog.