Irrigation

I had a simple plan for Saturday afternoon: Install automatic garden irrigation. Conceptually, it's pretty simple. There was already a sprinkler valve near the garden, so I just needed to T off the water line, add a drip valve, and reroute a little tubing. Voila! Instant irrigation. But things never quite work out the easy.

There were several gotchas along the way, the most annoying of which was the sprinkler wiring. Sprinkler wiring is not complicated, but the people who installed my sprinklers did something stupid. To make a long story short, instead of spending $0.10 on a couple wire nuts and about 30 seconds worth of work they created an extra hour of work for me.

I tried my darnedest to get all the supplies before I started, but there were several return trips to The Home Depot for various sprinkler trinkets. For example, I had to get something to repair a water line because I found out that a landscaping staple had pierced it. It's been like that forever (I probably even hammered that staple in), but the metal had rusted and sealed the hole.

Eventually (Sunday afternoon), I prevailed and we now have a nice drip system in the garden. Each plant gets its own adjustable dripper so we can give them as much or as little water as they need when the sprinklers run each day.



We replaced our dead cantaloupe, and added some new stuff: brussle sprouts, rosemary, dill, radishes, sunflowers, and strawberries.