Monday, August 26, 2019

Moving the Front Bed to Zone 9

We are re-defining almost everything in the front yard.  Originally the front yard had two irrigation zones:  Zone 10 to the West of the sidewalk and Zone 11 to the East of the sidewalk (between the sidewalk and the driveway).  While we are keeping this basic idea, we also wanted to consider the beds.  There is an existing bed in front of the house, between Zone 10 and the house, which now expands and runs into the area near the gas meter -- from the house to the West property line, and from the fence gate to the retaining wall.


While all the other zones are behind the fence, it seems to me to make sense to extend Zone 9, which is a set of beds from the backyard deck around to the West side of the house and up to the fence, to extend this Zone 9 to include the front yard beds by Zone 10.

There is already one head for Zone 9 in front of the fence, by the gas meter.


We can tap into that line to get Zone 9 water.

Currently the front bed gets it's water from Zone 10 via a pipe that runs under the stone wall defining the front bed.  We can cut that, and cap off the line going to the bed sprinkler heads.



Then one end of the front bed irrigation line, close to the downspout for the gutters that runs into the French drain, went to a head in the yard, which we have already removed.  If we run a line from the Zone 9 head by the gas meter to this end of the front bed lines, we will have moved them all to Zone 9.



So we dug out from the end of the front bed lines around the corner of the house and then down parallel to the side of the house -- 16 inches from the foundation -- to the Zone 9 head.


At the Zone 9 lines, we cut it and inserted a T-fitting.  Then a 10-foot section of 1/2 inch PVC.  At that point, we put in a sprinkler head, for the bed here by the side of the house,  and then continued to the corner.

At the corner, we turned around the corner and connected to the end of the front yard bed irrigation heads.



While we were doing this, we also ran a line diagonally to the other side of the bed, to the partition wall, to help get all of the new bed behind the retention wall.



This gives 3 heads to water the extension of the River of Rocks between the retention wall and the fence, and between the house and the neighbors yard.  This will include the first elm tree, the monkey grass between the rocks of the River of Rocks, and any other plantings in this area.