Drip irrigation for the herb beds

One of our major expenses is for water. Specifically for watering the lawn and garden during the summer. We have a full automatic sprinkler system, but we would like to see about improving it -- being more efficient in how we water.

I went to a talk put on by the City of Austin which suggested drip irrigation. In particular, this was using a drip line, rather than the individual lines to each plant. I've been adverse to doing the individual plant lines since plants come and go and it seems like a lot of maintenance to keep up with it. A drip line, on the other hand, can be used to saturate an area, but from underground, rather than by sprinkling it thru the air. This should cut down on evaporation and misting and all that. We apply the water directly at the roots, in the ground.

At the talk, the speaker said I could find all the stuff at Lowe's or Home Depot, but I couldn't. I could find the area, and some of the micro-irrigation equipment, but not the drip line and all it's supporting units. But checking on the web, I found http://www.rainbird.com and it has provided what I need. It was not easy finding the information on drip irrigation, but there is more under "Professionals" instead of "Homeowners". In particular, if you ask for a Retail Store, you get the standard Home Depot and Lowe's, but if you go under "Professionals" and "Find a Distributor", you can get the name of places that sell actual drip irrigation equipment.

I went with the XFS Subsurface dripline. This allows me to put the irrigation line under the ground and saturate an area at the root line. Plus in this part of the country (Central Texas), it is not going to freeze below ground and it's out of sight. To start with, I simply want to do 3 beds -- the beds around the back porch with my Irises and Linda's herbs. When I put those in, I used Zone 5 just for them. So I have a complete zone dedicated to these beds and can switch the entire zone.

In the following photo, notice the 3 sprinkler heads -- one in the top bed and two in the bottom bed.



Similarly, in the Iris bed, there is one sprinkler head in the back corner.



(These pictures before the change are not current -- the irises are doing badly from the freezing weather, and, I believe, the lack of water, which is why I need to get this new drip irrigation in place.)

We started with the dripline (XFS0912250) and 3 1800 Retro units.



The 250 feet of dripline was $110.50, while the 1800 Retro units are $23.60 each. The idea is that the 1800 Retro units replace a pop-up sprinkler head. They thread onto a normal 1/2 threaded PVC pipe and contain both a filter and a pressure regulator to lower the water pressure to 30 psi. That means that we get out of the two outlets on the top (the "tee") clean water of the right pressure for the dripline.

I dug down in the bed to the bottom of the sprinkler risers that were there until I found the connection to the underground water supply. For the iris bed this was already a 1/2 PVC female connector, so just putting a 1/2 PVC nipple to connect the two female threaded pipes, I was able to thread the 1800 Retro unit right in.



Then I cut 8 feet of the XFS dripline and pushed it onto the tee. This was the hardest part. The designers at Rainbird made it easier, because the top of the 1800 Retro unit screws right off, revealing the filter.



With the tee separate from the filter and housing, I was able to shove both ends of the 8 feet of dripline onto the tee, creating a loop. I could then put the tee back on the top of the filter housing, and screw it on, and then bury the loop of dripline, up along one side of the iris bed and back on the other. Then a bag of mulch to cover everything up.




The same sort of thing for the other beds. First dig down and find the bottom of the sprinkler riser to get to the water supply. In this case, it turned out the connection was a 3/4 inch female threaded PVC, so I had to get two 3/4 inch male to 1/2 inch male adaptors. Using them it was simple to attach the 1/2 1800 Retro to the 3/4 inch water supply, about 12 to 14 inches down from ground level.



The upper bed needed about 12 feet of dripline, but I mis-measured (at the bed) and thought it was 13 feet. Once I had put the dripline on the tee, it became obvious that the dripline was too long, so I had to take it off one end of the tee and cut it a foot shorter. It was extremely difficult to get off the tee, so for the lower bed, I only put it on one end, then laid out the dripline to the right length, and put it on.



The bottom bed was much the same, but longer -- 24 feet of dripline. And it originally had two sprinkler heads, so I used one and capped the other off.



As with the iris beds, I buried the dripline a couple inches underground and then put a bag of mulch (4 bags altogether), over the top, to cover the dripline.

Everything went pretty smoothly. I started at 11:00 AM and was finished by 6:00 PM, and that included two trips to Home Depot for the 1/2 to 3/4 adaptors and for the mulch and lunch. There were two problems.

Just as I was screwing on the top of the last 1800 Retro, for the lower bed, I tightened it down and heard a "snap". Something had broken under ground. Luckily it was not the $24 1800 Retro, and it was not the water supply, it was the 1/2 to 3/4 inch adaptor. I was able to get it out of both the ground water supply end and the bottom of the 1800 Retro and had to go back to Home Depot to get another one (I got two to be sure I had an extra). So that was a delay, but worked out fine.

The other problem was that when I turned on the sprinkler zone, at the box in the garage, to test it out, it seemed to do nothing. Which is sort of what is expected. But walking over to the iris bed, I could hear a noise coming from the corner where the 1800 Retro and tee are. Digging it back up, I could see it was spraying water all over from the joint between the housing and the screw on top. I took it apart, cleaned it off and put it back together, tightening everything by hand. Same problem. I eventually used a pair of channel-locks (a very large pair of pliers) to tighten the head on as much as possible and that stopped the leakage. I dug up and checked the others; they were all right. I'm not sure why 2 of the 3 worked fine with hand tightening, but the third needed extra tightening.

Now the system is in place. You can't tell if it is on or not. After running it about an hour, most of the beds still seemed very dry, so maybe it needs to run longer or maybe this is not the best solution. The sprinkler system is set to run twice a week and zone 5 gets to run for an hour each time. We'll see if that is enough to keep the plants happy.

Measurements suggest that zone 5 uses 60 gallons an hour when it's running. I measured it twice. Once it used 57.6 gallons; the second time it took 66.8. With about 45 feet of dripline, this would be about 1.3 gallons per hour per foot.

Removing Rock from the North Pit

We dug all the dirt out of the pit north of the raised bed, resulting in a trapezoidal hole 12 feet wide and between 11 and 13 feet long.



Now we need to remove the rock, so that the pit is deeper. At the shallow end, it is only about 8 inches deep; we want it to be about a foot and a half. This requires removing a layer of rock from the pit. We are assuming that, as with the rest of the yard, the rock in our yard is layered, and we can remove just the top layer or so to get the depth that we want.

On Thursday, we used the jackhammer to start breaking the rock up, using what appears to be a natural fracture running diagonally across the pit. This works pretty well, and in the first day's work, we extract two large rocks, and a big pile of smaller ones in the corner of the pit.



We still have to lift one of the big rocks out of the pit, separate the smaller rocks from the dirt and move the rocks and dirt out of the pit.



We spent all day Friday lifting the rock out of the pit and cleaning up. Then on Monday, we went back to breaking up the rocks with the jackhammer. Tuesday was (a) moving the rock around to the driveway, and (b) moving the dirt over to the dirt pile.



On Wednesday, we were able to just use the pry bar and grubbing hoe to loose the rocks and take them around front. After moving the dirt to the dirt pile (and mixing it with leaves), we had a complete ditch from one corner of the pit to the opposite corner.



Thursday, we used the jackhammer to break up the smaller corner and start on the larger one.



And Friday was just hauling all the rock out of the pit and out to the front of the house.



This left just the one corner with rock. Using the jackhammer, we broke it all up.



And we then took it around to the drive way, leaving us with a level, empty pit.



This took another week, so the rock extraction from this pit took about a month. As long as it is empty, we need to think about how to finish it off, before filling it back up with dirt.

North of the Raised Bed

When I drove thru California, I stopped in Corning (Olive City!) and bought two new olive trees. I bought two olive trees over the internet back in February 2007, but one of those died. This seemed like an easy (and cheap) way to get back to having more than one. The suggestion is that you may need two to cross-pollinate in order to get fruit.

One of the new olive trees has been planted in the pit that I just excavated South of Linda's raised bed garden, which puts it near the just-moved Shin Oaks, and the first olive tree. It looked like the best place to put the second new olive tree would be North of Linda's raised bed garden. That way it would be close to the other two, but more or less out of the way. This area used to have an Asian Pear tree, but that didn't do well, and we took it out. So to start, this area is just grass.



First thing we do is remove the grass. It seems a shame to waste the grass, since it seems to be growing fairly well, so I'll try to take it up and transplant it to another part of the yard. In this case, I'll move it over the French drain, along the fence.

After the first day of digging, I have roughly half the grass removed.



To transplant the grass, I'm cutting down with the shovel, and then trying to take just the grass and maybe an inch or two of dirt for the roots, using the grubbing hoe, coming in horizontally just below the grass. Doing so allows me to peel off the grass and move it more or less intact.

Another day of work, and we have all the grass stripped off, and transplanted.



Now we can start digging the dirt out. As we do so, we encounter a fair amount of rock -- mostly loose rock of small to medium size -- no larger than a loaf of bread. The very top layer of dirt must have been put in with the grass; it's fairly good, clean dirt. But below that is a layer of construction debris and rocky, sandy from the house construction. We are finding pop-tops, some broken glass, wrappers, and even four foot sections of electrical wire.



Also chunks of asphalt. The asphalt is always the same thickness, about 2 inches thick, but is then broken up into random sized pieces.




Under this construction debris is the dark, heavy, native clay dirt. This can be harder to dig. When it is damp, it is heavy; as it dries, it becomes very hard. But we mix leaves in with it, and mix all the dirt -- the top layer, construction dirt, and the native clay -- mix all this up with the leaves and cart it off.

Because about 6 to 8 inches down, we hit rock -- the native limestone. It's fairly flat, but with some cracks and erosion. Once we get the the dirt removed, we will try to remove the rock.



The dirt that we remove, we are taking over to the area near the electrical box, where we were digging last. We'll pile it up there, and later, after the rock is removed, we'll bring it back.



Tuesday, more digging



And then Wednesday, more digging



And again Thursday, more digging.



Finally, on Monday and Tuesday, we finished with the digging.



The next step will be to start removing this bottom rock layer.

Summing up, it took 2 weeks to dig out all the dirt, separate the rocks and debris, for an area 12 feet wide and 11 to 13 feet long, from 8 inches to 24 inches deep. It's deep enough at the far end that I really don't need to remove any rock, but I do need to at the 8 inch deep end, and it's the ground that slopes, not the rock layer. The rock layer seems pretty level.

Moving the Shin Oaks

The purpose of digging up the pit was to provide a place to move the Shin Oaks. It has also been suggested that moving the trees should be done while they are relatively dormant.

The first step was to dig them out. I started on Monday. One day to dig the dirt out of the way -- remember that at least part of the dirt had been dug up before, and so it was fairly easy to dig it out again. By Tuesday, I could start with the jackhammer, trying to get the rock out. The objective was to dig down, more or less to bed rock, all the way around the trees. Wednesday and Thursday was more jackhammer work.

Once I was through the rock all around the trees, the trees themselves were sitting in a big ball of dirt on a layer of rock about a foot thick. Friday, I worked at breaking the rock up underneath the trees and their dirt. I managed to get the rock out of one side, and with effort to tip the trees over into the space where the rock on that side had been.



This exposed the rock on the other side, allowing it be broken into pieces and moved out of the way. With a lot of work, and two people, we were able to then roll the trees out of the hole, and drag them across the yard to their new home, leaving nothing but a big hole where they had been.



With the trees over in the new pit, I dug a new hole big enough for the root ball. Again, since this dirt had been recently (December) dug up and put back, it was fairly easy to dig a new hole for the trees. The new hole was roughly 70 inches by 40 inches and about a foot deep.



Pushing the tree into its new home, I then poured two trash cans of really nice composted dirt around the roots. Most of the dirt on the roots (but not all) had come loose in all the movement. I went back to the old home and got a wheelbarrow full of the old dirt and added it to the compost, then put back the dirt that had been dug out of the new hole, and shaped it into a berm around the trees, to allow water and mulch.



The main problem in the new location was that the trees wanted to fall over instead of standing up straight. They had tilted significantly in their old home -- I think to avoid the cedar tree that had been near them. I pulled them as close to upright as I could get them, poured the dirt around the roots to support this new upright posture, watering it and stomping it down.

But, to be sure, I got some straps and hooked them to the fence, pulling both trees to a nearly vertical trunk. The top of the trees still slides over, but it's a pleasant arch. I think if (a) the trees will live and grow in their new home, then (b) in some time -- probably months -- the new roots will hold them in place and I will be able to remove the straps. But I should probably wait until October or November. November sounds better; hurricane season would be over, and the trees should be going dormant again.

We'll need to see if the trees like their new home. These are hardy trees not used to water or good soil, so their is a possibility that the new location will be "too good" for them and they will not survive.


An update from March 31. The trees are alive. They are putting out new leaves. It's hard to see in the picture, and it's not a lot, but at least it's something!

Filling in the South Pit

December 2010

The pit is done (at least in the short term). Several days of shovelling dirt from the dirt piles in the back yard into the wheelbarrow and then dumping it into the pit has both eliminated the dirt piles, and filled in the pit.




The dirt in the dirt piles was what I saved from digging out the pit (and other parts of the yard). Mostly it would then be the heavy clay that is native to this area. But it also includes some amount of sandy loam that some contractor would have brought in, and some amount of better, composted soil that we brought in later. But still the bulk of the dirt is not very good. So to improve the soil quality, I mixed in 32 bags of leaves, and about 30 bags of "organic humus".

The "organic humus" is the least expensive soil additive from Lowe's. It's mostly semi-composted wood products. It looks like pine needles plus other stuff. The leaves were from the neighbors. It being Fall, lots of people rake up their leaves, put them in bags and leave them on the curb for the City to pick up. I picked up some of these bags and brought them home.

As I was breaking up the dirt piles and shovelling it into the wheelbarrow, I mixed both the leaves and the humus into the soil. The theory is that this will add organic compounds to the soil, and make it better soil. It certainly makes it lighter and airier. I expect it to settle quite a bit over time in the pit.

The two spots in the back yard where the dirt used to be piled are now just barren dirt spots.






I've tried to spread some grass seed and put down a layer of organic humus on the top of each area. If we were to get any rain, the grass might grow and help keep the dirt in place. If this doesn't work, I'll try something else next Spring.

I have receipts for 30 bags of the humus from Lowe's this month $46.76, plus there were probably a dozen from a previous purchase. In addition, it was taking days to move the dirt from the piles into the pit, so, since time was of the essence at this time of the year, I hired a day laborer to help with shovelling. $80 for a days work. This allowed me to finish up the digging in one day.

Finishing the South Pit

So first we take the rocks out to the curb. Line them up along the curb.




Then we put a notice on Craig's List and wait for people to come take them away. In this case, I put the notice up on Saturday. On Sunday, we drove my daughter back to college. In the four hours to do that (from 1 pm to 5 pm), all the rocks disappeared. All of them plus 4 or 5 that were to the left of the above picture, from our own rock garden.

Now the pit is empty. We have, occasionally over the past decade, had problems of things digging under the fence. Dogs, cats, possums, armadillos, skunks -- don't know what it was, we could just see the hollowed out area that they used. When we dug out the Bamboo Grove, we put a stone wall around it at ground level next to the fence. Since we have it all dug out, let us do that here too.

First we pour a cement wall down to bedrock. Just as with the bamboo grove, we use a 1x4 for spacing, and a piece of masonite cut down to eight feet by 16 inches for the framing. We stack up bags of dirt next to it to keep the framing in place. The bags of dirt are just mulch and compost plastic bags filled with dirt from the pit shovelled into them. This picture shows the result on one fence.



And here we see the process in progress on the other fence. When we were digging straight down from the fence, to get the back side of the cement wall, we hit a couple more rocks. In particular the really big one in the following picture. I was able to move it out with a pry bar, but it was too heavy to move. Before pouring the cement, I used the jack hammer to break it in two pieces and rolled them up the pile of dirt in the pit to the edge, then out to the front to take the place of a couple of our missing rocks.




It took 29 bags of cement (from Home Depot at $3.10 each), and 4 bags of mortar ($3.77 each) for this work. The limestone rocks for the top were left over from the previous work on the Bamboo Grove

Once the cement wall is poured, I can then mortar limestone blocks on top of it to finish it off. Once the dirt is back in the pit, all you will be able to see will be the top of the limestone brick, as an edging. It should keep things from digging under the fence, including animals and roots from trees or anything. It may make it easier to mow or edge the lawn.

It is not clear what effect it will have on drainage. In theory any rain in the yard will sink down and be stuck here, unable to soak under ground down the hill. But it's well away from the house, and I assume any plants in this area would welcome any extra water. (Plus, at the moment at least, any water can just go to the right and around the wall, since the wall is only at this corner (and the opposite corner, where the Bamboo Grove is).



This gives a pit about two feet deep and 16 feet by 24 feet. The next step is putting all the dirt that I dug out back into the pit. To increase the quality of the dirt, I will add compost and vegetation. Luckily it's now Fall, and the trees are dropping their leaves. I should be able to get bags of leaves from the neighbors to add to the dirt as I put it back in.

The bags of dirt from the Bamboo Grove that I used for the forms were mostly limestone rock dust, from when the utility trench was put in thirty years ago. Apparently when they are bagged up, get wet, and sit around for 6 months, they get hard and are not of much use. So I took them to the Travis County Landfill, $18.60. I had previously taken a load of loose rock out (another $18.60), but am now trying to get rid of the loose rock on Craig's List.

The final rock in the South Pit

I spent the last couple of days raking the rocks out -- all the rocks that are produced as a side effect of breaking larger rocks into smaller rocks -- the debris that's left over. Now all that's left is the one big rock in the middle of the pit.




After two hours of jackhammering and pried rocks apart, the big rock is gone, replaced by a bunch of smaller rocks and the accompanying debris.



Tomorrow, we haul all these out to the curb and try to get rid of them.

Replacing Windows (Part 3)

November, 2010

We are having the last set of the old metal frame windows replaced with wood frame windows. This is the third time we've done this and finally replaces all the windows in the house.

We are again using Renewal By Andersen, a nationwide chain of window replacement companies. A phone call to them set up a meeting for a person to come out and measure all the windows, settle on options (color, trim, screens) and provide a cost. We had 17 windows left to replace.

Mostly it's a one to one replacement, but in the dining room, the current windows are two very large windows, and while it would be possible to replace them with two new very large windows, our experience with very large windows is that they are hard to work with. So I suggested that they replace the two windows with three. That meant we were replacing 17 windows with 18 new windows.

The total cost was $25,705. This includes the windows, the labor and materials to remove the old windows and install the new ones, and finish them. We went with an exterior aluminum cladding (Terra Tone), with an oak veneer interior. The actual window is a mix of wood and plastic that is supposed to be very stable. The oak interior will be stained to match our current oak floors and window trim, and then sealed with a coat of polyurethane. I expect to go back and sand everything down and put a second coat of polyurethane on since I believe everything needs two coats.

I put $13,000 down on 11 Oct 2010. The local company then sends the measurements off to the factory (in Minnesota or some place) which makes them to order and then trucks them down here. I got a call on 3 Nov that the windows were here and scheduled them to install them on Wednesday 10 Nov. The rough schedule suggested it might take 3 days to install them (Weds, Thurs, Fri).

Come Wednesday, no one showed up. I got a call that the crew was running late on the previous job they were doing, but would be there on Thursday.

On Thursday, 3 guys show up, and today they replaced 12 of the windows. As an example, here is a picture of the old dining room window.



First the window panes were removed, and then the frame was removed. This created a large hole in the wall where the windows used to be.



Now the new windows can be put in place and screwed in place to the framing around the old window. Spacers are constructed and put between the two windows, or in this case between the three, since we replaced these two big windows with three windows, to make them smaller and easier to manage.

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Once the windows are all securely in place, oak trim pieces are attached to cover the space between the windows, and quarter round put all around the frame where the windows meet the sheetrock to finish it off.



The outside of the window is filled with an expanding foam sealer, to keep it air tight, and a finished trim piece attached. Since some of these are in a stone exterior wall, someone will come over and mortar around the windows on the outside, to blend it in with the existing stone exterior.

Today, Thursday, all of the windows except the ones on the back porch were replaced and sealed. The exterior trim will be done tomorrow (Friday), as will the remaining windows. At least that is the plan.

December 2 Follow-up.

The inspector from the City of Austin came today. A building permit had been taken out to replace the windows, and the inspector came to check things out. By and large things went well. There were two (or three) problems. One was that the windows next to the door have to be "tempered" glass, not regular glass. So this means that the window next to the sliding patio door needs to be replaced. Someone said this requirement is because you can really slam a door, and vibrate the wall, and a window within two to three feet could then break. Not at all clear that this reasoning applies to a sliding patio door.

The other problem was the windows in two of the bedrooms. We didn't have these replaced this time, but apparently the third problem was that Renewal by Andersen had failed to take out a building permit for the previous window replacement work. In the second part of the window replacement, we took out the sliding windows that were in these bedrooms, and never really worked very well, and put in two side-by-side double hung windows. These work much better, and look better. All in all, a substantial improvement. Except they apparently do not meet code. The problem, as explained, was that in a fire, they are not big enough to get out. So the inspector said they had to be sliding or casement windows. I've had both before and prefer these double hung windows.

We'll see what happens on these issues in the future.

Back to the rocks

Having finished the back deck, it's back to the rocks. The general approach is to break all the big rocks into smaller rocks -- small enough to be moved out.



As an example, here is the big rock in the South-Western corner of the pit.




We use the jackhammer to split it into many smaller pieces.



and the result is a jumble of rather large rocks, probably weighing over 100 pounds. In this case, I think we broke the original rock up into eight smaller rocks. The intent is to make them as large as they can be, subject to the constraint that I have to be able to move them.



Once we have them broken up, we can move them out to the front of the house and put them on the curb. We post this on Craig's List under the "Free" category as "Landscape Rocks". In this case, our post is dated 6:00 pm on November 1.