Replacing our Telephone Line

We've been having problems with our telephone for some time. This is our AT&T land-line telephone, the one that was installed when the house was built in 1986.

For a couple of years now, the amount of static and noise on the line has been increasing. Last year (September 2010), when Hurricane Hermine came thru, we got 14 inches of rain in one day. A couple of days later, the phone line was generating so much static that we couldn't dial out, or hear much when someone called. At that point, a couple of guys came out and said the problem seemed to be below the concrete pedestal in the back yard with the electrical transformer. Then they went away, and gradually, the problems with the phone line went away.

This year, the static and noise increased again (and we've had no rain). Eventually it got bad enough I figured we needed to try again. I put in a trouble report with AT&T. In retaliation, the phone line decided to just die altogether. No signal. No dial tone. So at least it wasn't a subjective or transitory problem.

After 4 days, a repair person came out and agreed that the line was dead. The next day, a locator came out to (a) agree the line was dead, and (b) mark the lawn with where the line went and where the problem appeared to be. They can apparently send a signal down the line and when it gets to the break, it reflects and comes back. From the time it takes to get the reflection, they can compute how far down the wire the problem is. 39 feet. Which put it pretty much at the electrical transformer.

Another 4 days later, a crew of two guys showed up to dig up the lawn, to get at the phone wire at the point where the problem should be. They dug down and found the trench in the limestone where all the utility lines are (phone, cable, electrical). But they could not find the telephone line.



So this digging crew left, needing another locator. F days later, another locator person showed up, and found a spot on the other side of the electrical box. Another dig crew came out and dug down and found where our phone line was split off from the main cable.



Since it was now some 14 days without a dial tone, the installer put in a new telephone line by opening up the main line and splicing on a new cable, and then ran that cable across the yard to the interface box on the side of the house and attaching it instead of the old line. The old wiring is still there, buried in the yard,
but useless, and detached. The new wiring is just a black cable running across the yard. Another dig crew needs to come out and bury the line.



Turns out two dig crews came out. On Wednesday, a crew of two guys came out and filled in the holes and removed the plywood and orange plastic fence.

This left the telephone cable coming up out of the ground on the right side of the electrical box, and then going back down on the left before coming back up and crawling across the lawn to the house. And they said that another dig crew would come out and just "shove the line under the grass", which is what the cable people did when they needed to replace the cable.



This seemed short-sighted, so I went out and dug up both sides, to find the cable, and then along the front of the electrical box, down to bed rock (which isn't very far right there), and threaded the telephone cable from the one side (where it attaches to the main telephone trunk), over to the other side, where it will continue to the house. There was lots of extra cable, so I coiled the extra on both the left and the right sides.



Then I buried all this, so that the right side of the box is completely finished, and the cable just comes up out of the ground on the left side, and then runs across the yard to the house.



Literally 5 minutes after I finished this work, the final dig crew showed up and 3 guys pushed the cable under the grass in about 10 minutes.



That should hold everything until this entire area of the yard is excavated.

Head waters of the new Walkway

The landscape plan shows a walkway from the gate past the North Pit, joining a walkway around the raised garden and then extending back to the walkway around the deck in the back. One side of the walkway is, effectively, the North Pit, so we are going to start excavating it, using the North Pit as a working area.



We've "outlined" the walkway using the grubbing hoe on the one side and have expanded the North Pit over to the curving edge of where the walkway will be. The next step will be to dig all the dirt out, put in the two "walls" below ground level that will define the two sides of the walkway, then fill the space between the walls with rock and put down decomposed granite, as a base, and the "Oklahoma Thin" flagstones that we used for the walkway around the deck.

First step is to dig. I'm starting the excavation near the raised garden, working towards the gate. That way the gate can continue to be used until I dig out the part just in front of it. If I then back fill at that end first, the gate will be unusable for the shortest period of time.



The excavation goes thru the traditional (a) dirt under the grass, (b) construction left-overs, and (c) native clay. All of these layers, especially (b) and (c) have random rock in them, which we pull out. Then we hit the first layer of rock. We could use this as the base of our walkway, or we could take it out and go down another 6 to 8 inches to bedrock.



Part of the last 6 to 8 inches of rock comes out easily, so we removed it. But we are planning on leaving most of this layer in place and putting the walkway on top of it.



Once we have this much excavated, we can start putting the walls in that will separate the dirt beds from the walkway. We start with the outer wall, next to the un-excavated area. We use a piece of black plastic on that side to separate the concrete wall from the dirt. When (if) we eventually get to digging up that side, the plastic should allow a clean separation between the wall and the dirt.



Putting the wall between the North Pit and the walkway is more difficult because it has to be supported on both sides. It's hard to get either wall up high enough because our forms are only 16 inches tall. I'm doing it in layers, so I can pour concrete, wait for it to firm up, then remove the forms and raise them up to pour the next layer.



I added a piece of 4 inch PVC irrigation pipe stretching from one side of the walkway into the North Pit. This is to allow wiring or pipe to be run from one side to the other in the future. It is expected, for example, that we will want to run 3/4 inch or 1/2 inch irrigation for Zone 3 from the valve controller on the once side into both the North and South Pits, to provide a water supply.



Once the concrete was built up enough, I can then mortar on the limestone blocks on the top, to finish the wall off next to the North Pit. Now I could put the dirt back in, and let it settle before planting.



This should finish the North Pit, with the exception of putting in irrigation and planting. Both the North Pit and the South Pit should be Zone 2 of the sprinkler system.

Removing the Last Juniper Tree

In 1993, I removed all the male juniper trees on the property. Over time, I've removed the female trees too. All except one. Linda put an "owl box" on the least female juniper tree, and so we were keeping it. But Linda says the owls, if there were any, have left for the summer, so I took the opportunity to move the owl box to another tree and cut down the last juniper tree.



At first, I was going to leave the tree -- just sort of trim it up a bit, so I took off the lower limbs, to "raise the canopy", leaving stubs for the birds to land on.



But then Linda said I had butchered it so badly, why didn't I just take the entire tree down? So I did.



This works out reasonably well, since the City is picking up "Large Brush" and tree trimmings. (The neighbor across the cove cut down 3 juniper trees, and has a much bigger pile of branches as a result.)



The owl box was moved to the Monterey Oak outside the kitchen.

Partitioning the North Pit

With the master landscape plan in hand, I know what to do with the North Pit. Next to the raised garden, we want a walk-way, similar to the walk-way around the back deck.

The back part, between the fence and the raised garden is already basically in place. We have a cement wall under the fence and the whole area is filled with rock. Now we want something similar next to the raised garden and the North Pit.

The first step is to dig out the remaining dirt next to the raised garden.



Next we need to build the wall that will separate the North Pit from the rock-filled walk-way. We first clear a path for it.



We could pour a pure concrete wall, but computing it out, it appears to be less expensive to use concrete blocks. The concrete blocks are 8 x 16 x 4 inches. With the limestone block on top, the wall should be about 20 inches tall. With blocks of 8 inches, I can do 16 or 24, but not 20. So I figure I'll pour about a 4 inch base in concrete, which will even out the uneven rock surface and give us the right height.



Once the cement base has set, I can mortar on the cement blocks. I leave a gap in the lower rank of cement blocks, in case water needs to flow from one side to the other. This is not expected to be a problem, but just in case. I can't finish the entire wall, since it needs to tie into a similar structure that I haven't excavated yet.



Once the wall sets, I can put all the rocks on the right side and start to spread the dirt on the left side.

A landscape plan

Once I started working on the North Pit, it became more obvious to me that I needed a long term plan of how to work on the yard. While I feel there is value in digging up the yard, removing all the rock, and improving the soil, I'm not sure that it should be returned to just grass once all this is done.

So we contacted a Landscape Designer, Liz Klein, from DesignMyYard. This started in March. Ms. Klein came over and walked the yard with both Linda and me, listening to what we wanted and seeing what we had. There were several sessions where she presented ideas and listened to our comments.

The result was a landscape plan for us to work on. While Ms. Klein normally seems to both come up with a plan and then arrange for it to be done, in our case we were happy with just the plan, and our own intentions to implement it over a longer time period. I'm not sure I care about reaching the goal of the entire landscape plan, but it gives me a direction to go when I need to make decisions about current work.



This plan shows that, for the current work, I will put a walk way from the fence next to the garage, past the North Pit, joining for a moment with a walk way around the raised garden, and then on around to the existing back patio/deck walk.

The area between this walk way and the house will become a bed for plantings. Part of this bed has already been excavated, but I will need to expand that. In addition, I can expand the North Pit slightly to lay the foundation for the walkway.

It's getting very hot now with Summer coming on, so most of the plantings should probably wait until Fall. That gives me several months to get things ready.

Changing the irrigation in the driveway peninsula

One side-effect of the digging in the North Pit is that it exposed part of the irrigation pipe for Zone 1. Zone 1 is mainly the peninsula of dirt that is between our driveway and the neighbor's driveway. I dug it all up and redid the sprinkler system for Zone 1 some time ago. The controller for Zone 1 is near the fence between the front and back yard.

It turns out one of the sprinkler lines started in the front, went under the fence, into what is now the North Pit, then over, parallel to the fence and back under the fence to in front of the fence. When I excavated the North Pit, I removed that line, leaving me with 3 stubs -- one to a head in the monkey grass in the back yard by the house (the garage actually), one that went to a sprinkler head in the front, and the supply line from the controller. The obvious thing to do was to move the supply line back to in front of the fence, and then run a line to re-attach it to the sprinkler head in the front. The head in the monkey grass should be re-routed to Zone 2, with the rest of the heads in the monkey grass.

So to get the stubs of the sprinkler lines out of the North Pit, I took a week to re-do these lines in front of the fence. Looking at this area, however, it seems silly to do a general spray head. The only thing in this area, near the fence between the front and back yards, are 4 crepe myrtle trees. Most of the peninsula is a few trees -- crepe myrtles and Bartlett pears -- and rocks. The dirt is covered with mulch. Nothing much will grow there, because of all the shade from the trees.

So rather than re-routing a line to the spray head, I took the spray head out, and put in bubblers for the 3 crepe myrtle trees that it should be watering. This gets more controlled amounts of water directly to the base of the trees, which should be much more effective.

The first thing to do was to run a water supply line over to the middle of the crepe myrtles.



Then, we ran a line down the middle, between the trees. We branched off this middle line to run a line to each of the trees, and put a bubbler on the end of each of them.



Then we covered the entire area with mulch. It took 10 bags of mulch to cover this area, where we had been digging.




It took 15 more bags to cover the rest of the peninsula.



This little back corner of the front yard, although it is adjacent to the rest of the peninsula has apparently never been excavated. This makes sense, since doing so would damage the root system of the trees. But for this limited digging, I found a lot of construction level rock and debris. I removed everything I could, and added a bunch of leaves and compost in putting the dirt back in.

Finishing the North Pit

With the trench behind the raised bed pretty well done, I need to extend the cement wall along the entire length of the fence. While the bulk of the digging in the pit is done, the edges need to be finished off. We have left about a foot of untouched dirt next to the fences, for stability while we were working.

For the cement wall, this means taking the edge of the excavated pit right up to the fence.



Continuing around the edges reveals more big rocks and also some irrigation pipes.



We need to decide if we take out the newly exposed rock, or just cement it in place and leave it there. Take it out. We took out all the rock along the edge of the pit next to the fence, and then, using our masonite pieces, made forms and poured a concrete wall down to bedrock.



It took 22 60 pound bags of Quikrete concrete mix for this wall (Home Depot, $51.92). Once the concrete was poured, we then mixed a bag of mortar mix and put the white limestone blocks on top.



We will wait a couple of days to let everything set, and then remove the bags of compost and forms, and then start shovelling dirt over into this corner. We will need to re-do the irrigation system where it comes under fence by the gate, and then back under the fence over in the corner.

Behind the Raised Bed

With the North Pit mostly done -- I'm still not sure how to finish it off -- we turn our attention to the strip next to the fence, behind the raised garden that would connect the North Pit and the South Pit. This strip is really weedy. It's only 4 to 5 feet wide and 16 feet long. It has no water supply (no irrigation), and is of variable sunny-ness, depending on what is in the raised bed. If I dig it up, I can continue the cement wall topped with a limestone brick on the top along the fence -- I'm inclined to do this treatment around the entire lot at the fence line.



But what to put back there? It's a pain to mow, and trim, this area. It's too small to really grow something; it mainly is used as a walk area to be able to get to the raised garden.

So, instead of putting in grass or a ground cover, the suggestion is to make it a walkway. In fact, to put a walkway all around the raised garden. If we put in a walkway that matches the sidewalk around the deck, it would match. That sidewalk was dug out, and then filled with stone and sand and decomposed granite, with flagstones put on top. That seems like a reasonable treatment for this area too.

The first step then is to dig it out. Starting on this, we find big rock from 2 to 8 inches under the soil. The soil is very dry, and easy to dig out.



At the moment, we will continue just taking the dirt off the top. But we need to decide whether we take the big rock out, or just cover it over, using the big rock as fill. If we take the big rock out, we will need to replace it with smaller rock to fill the space. The easiest answer is to leave the big rock there.

If we remove the big rock, however, we effectively trade the few big rock for lots of smaller rock. The big rock is easier to get rid of than the smaller rock. Plus there may be more dirt under the big rock, so removing it would give us a more stable finished product -- all inert rock and sand, without any shifting clay soil. On the fence side, we can do our cement wall with limestone block on top. I'm not sure what to do next to the raised bed.

A couple of days later ...

It was very easy to take out the big rocks.



The next step was to straighten up the fence side of the trench, to pour the concrete wall and put the limestone blocks on top. We needed to buy more limestone blocks (Whittlesey Landscape Sales, 640 pounds for $51.88). Plus I would need concrete (24 bags of 60 lb. Quik-crete, $56.64 at Home Depot).



As before, I draped some black plastic on the outside, to keep the concrete separate from the dirt on that side.


Then I used a set of 1x4 pieces of wood to keep the masonite form spaced from the black plastic, and poured the concrete in between. I used the bags of cow manure that I've been buying to mix in with the dirt (60 bags so far at 1.40 a bag, from Lowes and Home Depot). to keep the forms in place. I had to take special care around the fence posts.



And when the forms are removed, we have our wall.



Next, a little mortar and we put the stones on top.



And now we need to clean up the trench, getting it down to rock with both sides straight and clean, so that we can fill it up with rock.



The raised bed should be all pretty good dirt, so we want to partition it off from the trench and keep the dirt in/under the raised bed. We will use landscape cloth -- a weed barrier -- as a curtain to separate the dirt from the rock.

Once the weed barrier is in place, we can start filling the trench with the rock that we dug out of both the trench and the north pit. All that rock that we wheel-barrowed out to the driveway now is wheel-barrowed back. While it was on the driveway, we were posting it to Craig's List and so most of the larger pieces are gone; we have apple-size (and smaller) pieces left, which should be good fill.



This cleans off the driveway. We need a bit more rock for fill, and then to cover it with sand and decomposed granite as a base for flagstones.

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.