My physical disability limits what I can do- after a relatively small amount
of exertion I start to ache and become exhausted so I need some way of doing
this that gets round that. This is my first garden and I'm making it
low-maintenance and so on, but I haven't solved the hose problem yet.
I don't want to use sprinklers or anything sophisticated- ideally I'd just
like a hose I can manage, point where I want, then put away afterwards
without doing any hard work.

So far I've tried two. The first one was the curly kind that coils itself up
to a 3ft long coil when allowed to and tries to fight the user by trying to
coil up while in use, but is apparently 15m long. One of these could reach
all the relevant garden areas, just, but was much stretched in doing so and
could not be let go of for an instant in case it did something terrible, like
wreaking havoc by squirting water into the back of my TV and elsewhere as it
spings back through the living room window. It it required someone to hold it
while I went in and turned the tap on/off. I won't have someone else around
whenever I want to water the garden, so this hose on its own- ie just one of
them- is unusable.

I tried another hose- I got 30m of normal 1/2" hose from Screwfix for £12.
This didn't have the springiness problem but it was a huge hassle to drag it
all back indoors and coil it up again into a large messy pile of hose, which
once again required another person to help as after a short period of
hose-gathering-up I was exhausted.

I know there are other options. There are hoses that come on reels, some of
which seem to have a mechanism for winding back onto the reel. This would be
an improvement over the non-reel straight hose, but it still sounds like a
fair bit of work to wind it all up. There is a 20m reel-hose combo special
offer on the Crocus site;

http://www.crocus.co.uk/toolsandstuf...ct_Card&ClassI
D=2000002910&CategoryID=127

that seems very affordable, but I wonder how much work it is to wind the hose
up.

There's another Hozelock hose-reel combo (not on the Crocus site) that is
only 10m long but automatically winds itself up- but the pics I saw seemed to
show it wall-mounted and I don't know if it can be used free-standing or if
it is portable, which I'd need.

I've had one other idea. Get another of the curly hoses and join the two end
to end. If I joined two of these there wouldn't be much fighting to do as the
whole thing would not be tightly stretched out like it was when I only had
one, and the self-coiling would be very useful in tidying it all up. I have
even thought of ways I could store this- it would thread onto a long-handled
tool like a rake and could be stored away neatly in this form- even two of
them- one on a rake and one on, er, another rake or something. I've inherited
some really bad quality garden tools and they would make an ideal storing
device for two of these curly hoses.

Any suggestions? Any ideas would be appreciated.

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