Wrangle-free hose hanger

Rather than wrestle with your garden hose, hang it high. Photo/Illustration: Christine Erikson

You’d think that a garden hose would want to recoil into the tidy small loops it sat in before it was dragged out for use. Sad to say, no hose wants to be such a goody-goody. Mine loves to force me into a rubbery wrangling session just when I think my gardening work is through for the day.

I’ve found that the reel-on-wheels hose gizmos work but are a pain to bend over and crank. Also workable—but tiresome—is coiling the hose into a round washtub to keep it neat. Recently, this rule of human-hose relations occurred to me: The fewer number of times you loop your hose, the happier you both will be. So I rehung my hose hanger head high. My wrangling days are over, as now a few large loops do the trick.