Wanted: Ground penetrating radar for gardeners

Amazon do a cheap GPR:

And useful when moving into a new for you place to check that a serial murderer hasnt buried its corpses there.

Hmm, I’m no expert on roses but I would have thought that planting them in rooty soil beneath a large tree is doomed to failure.

Tim

Come on, will keep the wife busy for years pruning and watering :-)

Silver Birch don't have a dense canopy, so there's plenty of light, and there are several shrubs already in the area which have done well for a few decades. The other factor is that there are a couple of hanging bird feeders in the area, which provide a steady diet of mulch and feed to the plants below.

The claim is, you can build your own GPR for €600 , which is roughly the price of a new hobby.

agreed.

Interesting project for e.g. a PI.

Having just read up on it, however, it may not be very successful at determining tree root positions. Especially in wet soils.

Where else would a climbing rose be planted?

Ours are next to some trellis.

Next to a pergola?

Owain

I did wonder about hire but even that is expensive

Who mentioned climbing roses? (They aren't.)

Mrs Trellis? Of North Wales?

I did. All my wild roses live next door to trees, and all my 'tame' ones are in hedged and treed borders...

Or you could just do what the new service providers did on my road and cut a groove down the middle cutting off all the tree roots as they went along.

I'm not sure what is involved in these radars. I would imagine that they must be pretty high powered and the radiation could be dangerous as well. Brian

Would not a simple spike of the depth needed do the same. If it hits something don't dig there. Be wary with roses. I have one under an apple tree, it was supposed to be a standard rose. now its transmogrified into a climber and only flowers at the top of the apple tree. Brian

Not gadgety enough :-)

When I moved into this house, there was a standard rose bush, which suddenly decided to throw out a long runner. It now adorns an arch over a path and much of the hedge on the other side of the arch.

"However, in moist or clay-laden soils and materials with high electrical conductivity, penetration may be as little as a few centimetres."

It's a radar, so it works with pulses.

Lower frequency gives greater ground penetration but reduced resolution (everything looks like a lump).

Paul

Not all radar uses pulses. The low-cost GPR described in the article you linked near the top of this thread uses frequency modulated continuous wave instead of pulses.