One of the Lamer Landscapers semi-successful projects was installing irrigation for us. They actually got it running in the spring of 2001. As usual, they demonstrated that they are landscapers not gardeners. Also cheap. They finally got the stuff running June of 2001 (only 9 months behind schedule). Two valves failed that summer.
In 2002, I ended up replacing all nine of the valves (some gawdawful no-name brand) with Toro from Home Depot. (Home Depot may be politically incorrect, but they’re the only source of this stuff in New Hampshire.) I also set up drip irrigation for the window boxes on the deck. (Something that the landscaper was supposed to have done and didn’t.) I ordered that stuff from The Drip Store out in California.
This year’s project is to replace the pop-up sprinklers in the beds with dripper-line. Aside from the fact that the cheapo sprinklers don’t do their patterns right, the landscapers-not-gardeners set them up to water the xeriscape they left behind. Now that we actually have plants, the bed along the driveway for instance alternates fungus with drought. (Genuine cheapo brand, assembled from name brand parts. Factory seconds, that is.)
Anyway, I started tonight with our shade bed: disconnected the sprinkler and put in a stub of 1/2″ tubing, then poked the 1/4 in dripper-line into that. I should probably get the correct connectors for the quarter inch, but I have the 1/2 stuff left from doing the window boxes. I also popped an emitter into the fuschia over the front door. With any luck it will now make it through the summer for the first time.
There’s another 100 foot coil of dripper-line left. I’ll put that in tomorrow, and put more on the Home Depot shopping list.
The yellow and brown iris is a re-bloomer that we picked up at Agway last year. It’s nice, I hope it does re-bloom.
We also got around to harvesting our second worm bin, and it was much more successful than the other one we did in May. This box had many more worms, especially babies, and much more volume of castings. Lisa needs to figure out which plants in the garden are going to get the extra special treatment, as we now have close to three gallons to spread out.