Sara and I tend to get impulsive when we walk around home improvement stores.  These solar garden lights are a fine example of our “Gotta have it ’cause its on sale!” attitude.  The old adage “you get what you pay for” has never rang truer before because once we put them in the ground, we found out why they had been priced to sell.

The garden lights are held in the ground by plastic stakes that are brittle and break very easily.  Several of them snapped in half when we were just pushing them into the spring-soft ground.
So, not wanting to negate the great deal, I had to come up with a cheap solution.  I took one of the broken stake remnants to the store with me one day and held it up to the dowels.  I found one that fit and bought two, 3-foot lengths.  I cut the dowels into 6-inch segments, so I would have enough for the 12 lights.

The dowels are a much more secure anchor in our yard that we don’t have to worry about snapping in half when mowing or trimming.  More importantly, for a couple of bucks for wood dowels, we were able to save the $30 “investment” in garden lights.

Let there be light!