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I never really thought of solar lights as a hobby. It crept up on me when I wasn’t paying attention. Now, my backyard has become a laboratory of ongoing experiments.
I’d moved to Phoenix from Oregon in 1997 and you can imagine the difference. They say Portland has average sunshine of 48% while Phoenix gets 85%.
I remember feeling like every day was summer vacation the first year I lived here. I’d never lived anywhere that had so much sun, that got so hot, and that had palm trees everywhere.
Yet, somehow, despite all those years of sun, I only got my first set of solar lights about 6 or 7 years ago.
They were a set of 3 pink tulips and at night they’d change colors, slowly fading from one to the next.
I had placed them right across the yard from our patio table so while I’d be sitting and working on my laptop at night I could look up and see them twinkling at me.
I grew up in NY with parents who loved to garden (still do) and my mother has always had flowers around. Some were wild and others were planted. There were always lilacs, Lily of the Valley, pansies, daisies, trillium, and phlox.
I didn’t inherit their green thumbs but that doesn’t mean I don’t love plants and flowers. I’m just bad at growing them.
I don’t know why I hadn’t thought to try solar ones until more recently but once I’d started it was hard to stop.
They’ve multiplied and are everywhere.
Some are for test purposes so I can write about them on this site. Others have been put to good use like the solar security light mounted over our garage.
I have pails of dirt in the backyard that I use for testing solar spotlights. I’ll stick one in each pail and move them around the yard to see what they look like in different areas at night.
I have solar roses randomly planted here and there just because they’re pretty.
I have four sets of solar fairy lights that have been laying in the middle of my pool deck for a month now soaking up the sun during the day and shining all night until I figure out how I want to use them.
The area behind our pool has become littered with spotlights, pathway lights, and more flowers.
Sitting on a storage chest are parts of one of my original solar pathway sets. A couple of them still work but all of them are in need of cleaning and refinishing. I’m so sure I’ll come up with a way to use them or repurpose some of the parts that I refuse to throw them away.
Thank goodness my husband is so patient.
He’s no longer surprised if he walks out into the yard at night and I’ve turned our entire house purple.
The section of the yard that runs along the side of our house had always been really dark and one night when I was on the patio working really late I heard a noise coming from that part of the yard.
I got up to check it out and took our dog with me.
As soon as we got around the corner of the house, my dog started barking and ran down that length of the yard towards the front of the house.
I barely caught the outline of a person in the glow of the street light as they hopped over the wall around our property and ran off.
We found out later that it was one of our neighbor’s teens who was coming into our yard to smoke so his parents’ wouldn’t see but it freaked me out, of course!
We now have two motion-sensor solar lights attached to the wall back there. If anything moves in that area, the lights turn on and shine in through our bedroom windows. I can see the light from the patio, too, so I won’t be caught by surprise again.
While my goal is to build a colorful oasis around the whole yard, my guess is that I’ll never be done running little experiments and trying new things and that’s just fine by me.