Home & Garden Notes from the Porch on Haw River Road

What this home and garden site covers

The house is a 1974 brick ranch on four acres, with a screened back porch that looks down a slope to a one-acre farm pond. There's a feeder pole by the porch steps, a short dock, pine trees on the far bank and a basement that has opinions about rain. The house runs on a well.

Sunday dinner happens on that porch from April to October. Somebody always asks a question about their own house. Which feeder keeps the squirrels guessing. What size sump pump. Why the new drawer pulls don't line up with the old holes. Whether the purifier on sale is big enough for the bedroom. This site is the long version of those answers, written down so you don't need to drive out to Haw River Road for supper.

Three of us sign the pages.

• Dell Pruitt writes the pool and pump pages and the clean air and water pages. He checks the sump pit before he checks the weather.
• Ken Abe writes cabinet hardware and bathroom vanities. He married our daughter Maya, and he's redoing a 1962 ranch in Greensboro one room at a time.
• I write the garden and bird pages, the gift pages, this page and the brand catalog. I'm an elementary school librarian, which explains the filing.

How the lists are built

Every product here is a real listing on Amazon US. We read what the maker publishes first, then what the listing says. A table only shows a value one of them states. If neither does, you get a dash, not a guess.

Each best-of list says, in a sentence or two, the rule that built it. "Feeders whose listing names the seed they take." "Sump pumps whose maker lists flow at a stated lift." You can check the rule against the table and decide if it's the rule you'd use.

A few things you won't find here:

• prices printed on the page (they change too fast; the Check price button shows today's)
• star ratings or scores from us
• claims that anybody on the team tested, installed or planted a product
• health promises for purifiers, humidifiers or filters

What you will find is a lot of measuring advice. Dell measures pits. Ken measures holes. I measure how long the Admiral, our resident gray squirrel, takes to solve a new feeder. (I have this logged. It is not flattering to me.)

Four corners of the yard

The site has four sections, in the order you'd walk out the back door.

Garden & Birds

Garden & Birds is mine. Bird feeders, hummingbird feeders, seed, bird houses and baths, wind chimes, yard decor, flower bulbs, hand tools, hoses, wheelbarrows and rain barrels. If you're starting from scratch, start at bird feeders and pick by the birds you already see. Bulb season runs right now, and tulip bulbs and amaryllis bulbs are open. So is the guide to when to plant tulip bulbs, which I looked up more times than I'll admit.

Pools & Pumps

Pools & Pumps is Dell's. Above-ground pools and their gear, plus the pumps that keep a house dry and running: sump, well, utility and transfer pumps. In the fall that mostly means basements. Start with sump pumps and the plain-English guide to what a sump pump is. Every pool page carries a short safety note, and Dell doesn't joke near it.

Cabinet Hardware & Vanities

Cabinet Hardware & Vanities is Ken's. Knobs, pulls, hinges, bathroom vanities, mirrors and medicine cabinets. His first rule is to measure before you shop, and his pages tell you exactly what to measure. Good first stops: cabinet pulls and bathroom vanities.

Clean Air & Water

Clean Air & Water is Dell's other section. Air purifiers and their filters, humidifiers, water dispensers and filter pitchers. He reads the room size and the clean air delivery rate before anything else on a purifier box, and the certification number before anything else on a filter. Winter is humidifier season here, so humidifiers is a good place to begin.

Home essentials by season

A yard runs on a calendar. So does this site. New pages open every week, and we try to open them in the month you'll want them.

• October to December: bulbs go in the ground, amaryllis goes in a pot, feeders get topped up, and gift pages lead the home page.
• January and February: humidifiers, heated bird baths and water filters. The porch is closed. The kitchen table is open.
• March and April: sump pits get checked before the spring rains, and hummingbird feeders go up before the first one arrives.
• May to August: pools, pool gear, hoses and watering.

Planting dates depend on where you live. Look up your USDA hardiness zone by ZIP code before you trust any calendar, including ours. The zones are drawn from each area's typical coldest winter night, and they tell you a lot about which month is "fall."

Gifts from the porch

From October through December, half the questions at Sunday dinner are about presents. Our gift pages are built the same way as everything else: a rule, a table, and a note on who should skip each pick.

• Housewarming gifts, grouped by porch, kitchen and bath, and the yard
• Gifts for gardeners, tools, bulbs and watering
• Gifts for bird lovers and gifts for hummingbird lovers
• Outdoor gifts, for the yard and the porch, not the campsite
• Pool gifts, with the pool safety note at the top

A gift doesn't have to be big. A bag of bulbs and a trowel has started more gardens than any catalog.

Backyard essentials, sorted by the question you're asking

Most people don't arrive here wanting a category. They arrive with a problem. Here's where the common ones land.

• "The squirrels are winning." Start with the "squirrel-proof" bird feeders page, then read the part about placement. Placement does more than the feeder's name.
• "I want hummingbirds." Hummingbird feeders, hung before the first one shows up, and cleaned more often than you'd think.
• "The basement got wet." Sump pumps and battery backup sump pumps. Measure the pit first.
• "The well pump is making a new noise." Well pumps, and the number of a well company you trust. Some jobs are a call for a pro.
• "The kitchen looks tired." Cabinet knobs and cabinet pulls. Count the holes and measure them before you fall for a finish.
• "The bathroom vanity is falling apart." Bathroom vanities and the guide to bathroom vanity height.
• "The air is dry all winter." Humidifiers, and a plan to clean one as often as its maker says.

Nothing on that list is decor, and that's on purpose. Fix the thing that's bothering you, then buy the gazing ball.

The chime at the end of the dock

Here's the one family story for this page. Years ago a long wind chime went up outside our bedroom window. My choice, my chime. It had a deep, slow voice, and I loved it. Dell lasted four nights. On the fifth morning the chime moved to the end of the dock, where, in my husband's words, "only the frogs complain."

Dell's take: "Pick a chime for the neighbors too. You live with it for years. They didn't sign up for it."

He's right, which I don't say often in writing. That's the spirit of the whole site. A product lives in a real place with real people around it. A feeder hangs near a roof the squirrel can jump from. A pump sits in a pit of a certain width. A vanity has to clear a drain that's wherever the last owner put it. So before any list, we tell you what to check about your own house.

Brands, filed A to Z

Every brand on this site is written about the same way. Brand pages show that maker's products first. If a company has only a few listings on Amazon US right now, similar products from other makers come after, under their own heading. The brand catalog lists every company we track, by section and in alphabetical order, with no ranking. A catalog that ranks isn't a catalog. It's an opinion with a filing system.

When this site isn't for you

If you want lab numbers from a stopwatch and a test pool, we don't have them, and we don't pretend to. If you want the lowest price today, the Check price button knows more than we do. And if you're hoping someone will tell you a feeder is truly "squirrel-proof", I can't help you. The Admiral reads the same listings I do.

If you want to know what a listing says, who a product fits and what to measure first, pull a chair up to the porch. The tea is sweet and the fan is on.