Questionable Use Case #2: Gardening With Golf Balls
If you have a glut of golf balls, they can be used as a rather expensive ground covering for your tree or shrub.
I live in close proximity to a golf course, and do not play the sport of… Scottish people(?) myself. However, over time I’ve collected a fair number of golf balls, to the point where they’ve become inconvenient to store.
One solution would be to sell the balls, but the only place I checked offers somewhere in the 10-cent range for each orb. So they continue to pile up in my garage, neither valuable enough to sell nor worthless enough to discard. So what am I to do?
The questionable solution came recently after installing an avocado tree gifted to me by my friend LK.1 I didn’t have any actual mulch handy, but I did have many, many golf balls, so why not use them as a ground covering for this nascent fruit tree?2
Whether this works or not would depend on the actual purpose of mulch, which, as I understand it, has something to do with decoration and/or water management. Checking my assumptions with ChatGPT–as one does these days–it appears that golf balls could, in fact, do at least a better-than-nothing job as a mulch stand-in:
Poking around a bit further, it seems many mulch varieties actually retain water themselves, and golf balls would certainly do a very poor job in this role. Plus, there’s the issues of the balls simply rolling off and/or people helping themselves to them.
It should also be pointed out that even at the ~10-cents-per-ball range I could get for selling them, actual mulch is far cheaper, often available for free if you know where to look. Additionally, I live in Florida, where it rarely drops below freezing. That’s probably relevant.
Even with all these caveats, I think it looks awesome. Or at least unique. In this category (at least) I’d call this a great success. Whether or not my HOA agrees with my assessment is an open question, but ideally they won’t come poking around, and/or they’ll be distracted by deficiencies elsewhere.
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Addendum/Footnotes:
If you’re wondering what Questionable Use Case #1 was, check out my Ramen noodles desiccant experiment. That one turned out to be a bad move.
Strangely enough, I was gifted this tree, then TWO hurricanes hit us here in the Tampa Bay metro area. Since my yard was first soaked by Hurricane Helene, then turned into a river by Hurricane Milton, I had to wait some time to plant it.
Since I couldn’t resist, and to make this post even more Tech Adjacent, below is a rather sad country song about our town getting hit by a hurricane, an avocado tree, and golf balls. If you want to know more about the process used to make this and similar songs, check out my AI Music Creation Is Here: Will It Change Everything? article.
LK: retired chemical engineer, fitness and horticulture aficionado. I know him from the local YMCA, and the tree came from his gardening exploits. Not to be confused with college–and current–friend TK2. Both men are from North Carolina originally, where, based on my very limited data, abbreviated names are extremely popular.
Is an avocado a fruit? It seems wrong to call something that isn’t sweet and/or juicy by this moniker. However, it does have a seed and is used for reproduction, so “fruit” would make sense here… Apparently they are further classified as berries, which seems even stranger to me.