News — Chapin Maintenance

In my travels I’m able to conduct landscape consultations from seed-to-shining seed! I may visit gorgeous homes, large businesses or hold simple tailgate meetings. There’s this one thread that they all have in common: the unusual ways they treat their sprayers. Ugh! Sprayers. Not the same ol’ metal one grandpa used for killing weeds with Paraquat, to applying fungicide on roses then filling it up with Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) to kill ants all within an hour of each other. In those days the same sprayer was used for everything and within two to three months it would be rotted out, gummy...

Did you know that many things gardening typically begins on the farm? Farmers are usually the trailblazers in bringing products we use for our garden to the consumer marketplace. Or, at the very least inspiring the inventors of the world to make something better and easier to use. For instance, in the 1850’s an insect called the Colorado Beetle was devastating the potato industry. A gravity fed leather knapsack, (think of a bota bag backpack on steroids – which probably leaked all over you), oozed a chemical solution out of a sprinkler head as the farmer painstakingly walked every inch...