It’s been half a year since the last time I posted anything. Since then I’ve made a lot of progress on the garden in my backyard. I’ll go back through some of the steps I took.
I started by working on the irrigation system. With the terrible drought we had last summer, there was no chance for anything in my yard to survive without an irrigation system. Most of my irrigation components came from www.sprinklerwarehouse.com, though there were a couple trips to Home Depot and even Sam’s Club. Sprinkler Warehouse is by far the best resource for sprinkler components. They have just about everything, and they’re local. So I’d place an order in the evening and go pick it up the next day during my lunch break.
My reference book expressed some clear and strong opinions concerning how to approach irrigation. The author advocated burying a soaker hose assuming a maximum effective width of 15″ to each side and carefully manipulating ball valves so the hose would constantly leak water into the beds. The trickle would be extremely slow, but should be planned to equal 3.5″ of rain during the summer and 1″ of rain during the winter. Since this plan is sensitive to the pressure in the supply lines, pressure that changes hourly through the day, I decided to come up with my own way.
I have an in ground sprinkler system. The first step was to find the three missing sprinkler valves for the backyard. After a lot of digging, speculating, and just work, one of my friend accidentally found the valve covers. We then set about digging a trench across what was to be the end of the beds and over to the valve.
The original installers of the sprinkler system for some reason decided they wanted to use schedule 20 pipe. After being buried for several years, this pipe was extremely easy to break and very difficult to cleanly cut for upgrades and repair. After digging the trenches, I set about repairing the damage we had done.
I figured out I had a completely or nearly completely duplicate zone in the backyard. That valve was the one I dug out. The valve was glued in, and rather high, so I cut it out. I added a device between the control solenoid and the valve that regulates pressure at a consistent 20psi and installed a filter. The difficult part was gluing the whole assembly back together. I ended up using four elbows in a specific way to jog the valve down, so the regulator would clear the valve cover, and to be able to reassemble the valve assembly.
From there, I tapped into the existing sprinkler line’s pipe with a snap on T and laid a 3/4″ schedule 40 line across where the ends of the beds would go with vertical risers in the beds. The risers were ended with 3/4″ FPT connections slightly below the existing level of the ground. I screwed a cap into each connection before burying the pipes.
Here’s what the ground looked like when it was all said and done.
And some other pictures of the yard at this stage:
