The Battles of the Yard

"The Battles of the Yard"  Written September 2018
   a sprinkler and drip system story (and beginner tutorial)

When warm weather starts and the rain subsides, it is time to check the sprinkler systems!  Since my husband and I decided to divvy up the yard work, I decided to learn all the important stuff for myself.  I am in charge of the front yard and he is in charge of the back yard.  And the battle begins.  So, I figured out how to turn on the sprinklers and this is what I got:



Holey Mackerel!!   Is anything getting wet besides the fence?  Under further investigation there are loads of bare black pipes, missing drippers and sprinklers and chewed up pieces on the ground.  I wonder how that happened??

Cute little puppies get bigger and so does the chewing! 

My sweet black lab "George" ripped up all the irrigation in the back yard and getting a new puppy didn't help things much!

I went to Home Depot and picked up some tubing and some drippers and some sprinklers.  Easy!  I got home and tried fixing the leaks, reburied the hoses and realized the problems were bigger than I thought.  The ground was soaked where I had just fixed the hoses.  Bad fitting hoses!  Old tubing and cracked fittings!  By my third trip to Home Depot I just stood there in the plumbing aisle and decided to just start over.  I talked to a guy staring at the equipment with the same blank look I had and told him "I have no idea what I'm doing - I'm learning by failure!"  He laughed and said he was doing the same thing!

I bought large black tubing, small black tubing, little black bubblers, spikes to attach the big hose to the little hose and a few sprinklers.  I recently learned to light the BBQ grill and can start the leaf blower now - I can do this.

I ripped up all the old tubing and foot by foot, put in new big tubing, new small tubing, and new bubblers for each plant.  I got to a place in the yard where the tubing went behind a bunch of bushes and not conducive to me crawling on my knees to bury new pipe.  I decided to connect my new pipe to the old pipe for that 30 foot stretch.  The old pipe was too small to fit right into the new pipe.

That's when I figured out that there were at least two sizes of big black pipe......I had bought 3/4 inch and the old pipe was 1/2 inch.  OMG, no wonder there were so many people wandering around in the plumbing isle at Home Depot!