Gardening in the fall can be one of the most rewarding times to be outside. The weather is cooler and all of the end of season flowers and plants being to bloom. One thing to remember is that when you winterize your garden you need to take care of your hose.

Many landscapers are so busy winterizing their lawns, gardens, shrubs and trees that they quite forget about a piece of equipment that has served them well on all those areas of the landscape during the spring, summer and fall -- the garden hose. Our garden hoses lie around on their garden hose reels for so many months consecutively that they become a landscaping fixture that we take for granted. But northern gardeners pay a great price for this oversight when winter arrives, bringing temps in the teens. Bring garden hoses in for storage prior to winter! Also bring their reels in for storage, especially if the reels have any metal components. And more important than a garden hose being ruptured through freezing is what the garden hose is connected to -- your water pipes. Ruptured pipes are costly and inconvenient to replace.

So what is the answer? The easiest and best solution is get a garden hose reel. Retrieval of hose or cable is accomplished by several types of rewind: manual, spring, and powered. Manual rewinds are popular where there is no convenient power source. Four methods of manual rewind are available: disk, direct drive, gear-driven crank, and chain-driven crank. Spring-rewind garden hose reels are ideal when a power rewind is required, but there is no available power source. Reels are installed in virtually any position. Spring-rewind reels have less torque than other types of rewinds and are best suited for hose lengths from 50 to 90 ft.

For convenience, ease of use and cost we recommend finding a self winding garden hose reel which is hydro powered. There are new garden hose reels on the market which use the flow of water from the spout to the hose to power the hose reel winder. These self winding hose reels are easy to wind and are not costly or dangerous like electricity. All they need is a flip of the button and they will rewind them selves.