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How To Care For a Vandalized Garden

Vandalism is difficult to prevent and control, most especially if your neighborhood is filled with youth looking for something naughty to do. Building walls, fences and public spaces are not the only places that can be vandalized because even gardens can be vandalized as well. Community gardens must be cared for by everyone in the community, most especially by those who live nearby and not just by the gardeners alone. Private gardens on the other hand, must constantly be populated and secured, but its beauty must also be shared by the community. Here are a few tips you use to help you care for your garden:

Always Maintain Your Garden

When your garden has been vandalized, you must not give up caring for it. It is important that you continue to care it regularly in order to bring it back to its original state. Spend some social time in your garden, talk to neighbors over the fence or hedge as you go about with your gardening tasks. You can also invite children who are interested in gardening to help you out.

Give Your Garden Sufficient Light

While gardens need sufficient light during the day, they also need sufficient light during the night for protection. Thought the sidewalk lamp may provide ample light for your garden, it is still essential that you have low voltage lights inside your garden. Not only will it keep vandals away, it can also help keep large pests away too.

Secure Your Garden

Locking your garden gates whenever you leave and even during the night is important. Sure, vandals may consider climbing your garden fence no matter how high they may be, but sometimes a locked garden discourages vandals from exerting too much effort just to have fun.

Plant Wisely

Visible plants, vegetables and even fruits that have attractive sizes and colors can tempt vandals to enter your garden. Plant your vegetables and fruits away from the pathway and other spaces in the garden that can be easily seen by passer-bys.

Celebrate Your Garden

Your garden may be your pride and joy, so why not share it with your neighbors and other community members? If your garden can hold quite a number of people, throw a simple garden party or potluck and invite some neighbors and their kids over. Make it a point to have youths invited as well because they are potential vandals in a community. You can also engage them in a gardening activity or just have some outdoor games.

Get Children Involved in Your Garden

If you have concern for your community, you can get the children help you beautify your garden. You can have them paint murals on your garden wall depicting the beauty of nature and its importance. When you get the young ones involved, they become concerned for your garden and even look out for it.

Have Troublemakers Pay The Consequences

It is understandable if you feel frustrated about having to repair or replace what has been damaged in the garden. This is why you can always get the vandals to pay the consequences by having them help you out each day in the garden and even chip in to cover any serious damages inflicted.

Valerie Clearwater is a freelance writer specializing in criminal law. She regularly contributes articles to legal websites where well experienced lawyers can be consulted about Massachusetts underage drinking and other offenses.

What’s out there?

by Tricia

Do you have security lights on your house?

If you do, when they go on do you happen to get up from what you’re doing to go and check what triggered the light?

I do.

I’ve got a security light at the side of the house in the driveway so if anyone or anything enters the driveway at the start of the house it will trigger the light. The sensor reaches to the end of the driveway too so if anything comes through the backyard to the driveway it clicks on.

The other security light is right at the back door. It’s sensor covers the end portion of the driveway, maybe the first third of the garden, and of course the area in front of the back door.

My husband installed these in our first couple of weeks in the house because he’s always been nervous about thieves. We did move into a fairly safe area though so I’m not quite as worried about that as he is.

I like the lights because if I happen to go into the yard at night I have light! I can see if there’s an animal lurking in the outskirts of the lights, and of course if I happen to be out there doing my late night watering the lights make me feel a little more secure.

When I’m inside the house, if I notice that one of the lights have gone on I’ll usually get up and take a look. Most of the time it’s a cat that’s wandered down the driveway or gotten into the backyard and triggered the light. Other times it’s raccoons.

I’ve yet to discover a human in my yard, but there was a guy who drank too much last year who got into our neighbors yard. I think he camped out in the yard for a while. Then he tried to break in to their shed and broke a bit of the fence as he did it or perhaps the fence broken when he tried to climb into our yard. I’m not sure. Anyway he did get into their shed and he stole their boys small bike.

Our neighbors now have a security light. Except they don’t have it set to automatically come on? Strange.

So, back to my question … do you look outside to see what’s out there when your security lights come on? If you do – what have you discovered?

Peace of mind with IDrive-E’s online backup

by Tricia

Some of my websites have seen a large increase in traffic lately and have obviously grown in popularity if the traffic, page views and number of comments are any indication. I would hate for anything to happen to my sites such as a failure at my web host that wiped out my sites contents on their servers.

I would be absolutely devastated if I lost the contents of my sites with no way of recovering the information. Equally, if something were to happen to one of my home computers that caused me to lose precious financial data, my many photographs, graphics and other bits of information that I consider important I’d be quite upset.

I do backup my sites on my computer, and since I have two computers I keep a copy of my most important information on each one, but that’s starting to load up my hard drives as the amount of backup storage space needed gets bigger and bigger.

That’s why I’m thinking of using IDrive-E Online Backup. Sure I might still continue to back up onto my computers but I’d also have the added security of having an online backup.

IDrive-E is a leading consumer online backup service. You can encrypt the data that you store, and you’ll have open file backup support as well as a number of other fantastic features.

It’s also free! IDrive-E offers 2GB of free remote backup space. What’s more- there are no backup or restore restrictions, no bandwidth limits, and no file type restrictions either. So you could do a daily backup of your precious data without any problem at all.

You can set it up and do fully automated remote backups of your files and folders, and be assured that your data is secure since IDrive-E uses advanced data encryption. You can also do incremental backups, mapped drive backup and so on.

If you need more than 2GB of storage space you can get unlimited storage space for just $4.95 per month or purchase 12 months worth of IDrive-E online backup for only 49.50 which of course means that you get two months free of charge.

I’m going to try their free service for now and if I need more storage space I might purchase their one year plan. Certainly for the peace of mind and security it gives you, you can’t beat a free offer like this.