Irrigation for the West Lawn Upper

With the Retaining Wall laid out, we can outline where the River of Rocks will go.  Not actually laying it out or putting it in place, but just outlining where it will go, relative to the main area of the West Lawn.

And once we have that in place, we can now look at what we want to do for an irrigation system for the main West Lawn, the Uppers above the Retaining Wall, all the way back between the fence and the River of Rocks.  Most of this is shady, from the Oak tree and the Elm trees.  Our intent is to put in native grasses that are shade-tolerant and drought-tolerant.  Low maintenance.  Our landscape plan says Inland Sea Oats and a Texas Sedge.

So I've designed a irrigation plan that involves a big loop around the area, with a couple of lines run from side to side to put a head in the middle of the area.

First we located the Zone 8 valve

We connected to the Zone 8 valve both to the outer loop and to one of the lines that go from side to side.

The output from the valve is 1 inch PVC.  We attached a 1 inch Tee and then brought those two lines to the same depth as the main lines, reduced it to 3/4 inch and attached it to each of the two lines.   We run 3/4 inch PVC around the entire area.  Every 10 feet (since the PVC lines are 10 feet long), we put a sprinkler head with a 3/4 inch Tee that has a 1/2 inch threaded center hole, which goes to a 2 inch nipple to the irrigation head.

We ran a line along the fence.

and along the new masonry work.

along the Retaining Wall

Then up along where the River of Rocks will be

past the connection to the valve and all the way up to the middle Elm tree.

At the end of both sides (next to the fence and next to the River of Rocks), we just ran a line as far as seemed reasonable and ended with an irrigation head.

And then after all the irrigation heads are in place and things are tested, we can cover it all up.

And we can top this off with the good dirt that we have piled in the middle of the back yard.  This reduces the pile

to nothing.

and fills up the back half of the new West Lawn.

We then sowed about a half a pound of inland sea oat seeds on this good dirt -- between the tree and the fence.  The expectation is that the seeds will act like they fell from their previous inland sea oat plants, lie dormant over the winter and sprout come Spring.

Using a Metal Detector

While digging over the past months, I have run into a disturbing number of rusty nails and other old construction debris.  While I can discard the rusty nails I find, it suggests there might be even more that I am not finding.  I would like to find and remove all (or almost all) of the old rusty nails.

A brief review suggests that a metal detector could find at least some of them.  Metal detectors are normally used to find coins or jewelery and such, but there are settings which will find "all metals".  New metal detectors can run several hundred dollars, but for my purposes, a used one will be fine.  I look on eBay and it appears that good ones go for $50 to $100.  Checking craigslist.com, I find one locally (well, within 50 miles) for $50, and drove down to Kyle to buy it.

This particular metal detector is a Bounty Hunter Tracker IV.

A PDF of a User's Manual can be found on-line.  Since I am still trying to do construction, I have not had time to do more than just try it in a small area, but just 10 minutes in the area near the Iris bed produced a dozen nails.

So this seems like an effective way to find nails in the dirt.  I should try to sweep over the back yard before declaring construction complete.


Update.

After almost a year, I've used the metal detector only a handful of times -- maybe 6 to 10 times.  But it has worked wonderfully.  In excavating the bed by the back bedroom, for example, I have found a lot of nails.

So this definitely seems like a useful tool to have occasionally.

Excavating the West Lawn Bottom Zone, Part 3

More digging.

 Extending the Retaining Wall.

Digging up to the back yard patio sidewalk, to begin laying down the other end of the River of Rocks.

We need to find proper height rocks to extend the Retention Wall over the excavated path, and then put the River of Rocks over them.

While we were working on this, the Fall rainy season arrived.  At one point we got 5 inches of rain, which flooded the pit that we've excavated.

And then five days later, we got 8.5 inches, flooding it again, and even higher.

The result is that it is too wet to work.  The dirt is very heavy and sticks together; I think this is from a high clay content.  After two weeks, it's difficult to dig, but possible.  I used this time to finish the Retaining Wall and link it in with the beginning of the River of Rocks by the back sidewalk.

Water Supply for Zones 6 and 7

We saw some weeks ago that irrigation zones 6 and 7 had valves in the middle of what is now the West Lawn Bottoms.  We dug these up and found that they had a common water supply line heading back towards the house.

We removed these lines and capped it off, and then extended the Retention Wall up to where the water supply line was capped off.

Both Zone 6 and Zone 7 will be for the lawn sections below the Retention Wall (Zone 8 is above the Retention Wall), so we need to bring them thru the Retention Wall. 

First we dug back to discover where the water supply line comes from.  It turned out to Tee off the main irrigation water supply line.  The main irrigation water supply line is a 1 1/2 inch PVC line running, in this section, parallel to the back of the house -- about 31 or 32 inches away from the foundation of the house.  The Tee for zones 6 and 7 is 72 to 74 inches West of the corner of the house (next to the Iris Garden).  We replaced the schedule 20 PVC with schedule 40 PVC.

We then ran the line down to the Retention Wall, dropped it down (since the ground is sloped down)

and then we ran it thru where the Retention Wall will be and reattached the valves for Zone 6 and Zone 7.   We taped the electrical control wires to the bottom of the PVC pipe.

This positions them to be used for irrigation lines to service what will some day be the lawn part of the West lawn, and the Central Lawn area.

The main lines are 1 1/2 inch lines.  They are stepped down to 1 inch lines for the valves.  The valves have 1 inch input and 1 inch output.  We will probably step that down to 3/4 inch lines with 1/2 taps for each sprinkler head.

Excavating the West Lawn Bottom Zone, Part 2

For the past month plus, we have been continuing to dig out the Bottom of the West Lawn while extending the Retention Wall and filling in behind it with the dirt excavated out of the Bottom.

We continued with the digging.  Both next to the Jungle,

and next to where the Retaining Wall needs to be extended.

Until, at one point, I hit a main irrigation line taking water to the control valves for Zones 6 and 7, which have pretty much been taken apart.

and once the valves have been found, we exposed the entire water supply line, and removed it, keeping the valves so they can be reused.

Continued digging exposed more and more rocks, big and small.

Some of these rocks were used to extend the Retention Wall.

Filling in Around the Tree in the West Lawn

The Stone Retaining Wall is part of the work to terrace the land around the big tree in the West Lawn.  The other part is along the fence.  If we raise the level of the lawn, we will need to keep the dirt off the (wooden) fence.  We have a base of concrete, with a stone topping along the fence.  We want to build that up, and level it, so that we can fill that area with dirt.

We begin putting down short courses of stone, to try to get it more level.

After about 5 courses of stone, we have it pretty level, almost all the way.

Still need a bit of work at the far end. 

But with it this well done, we can begin to fill it in.  We have a pile of dirt from the excavation of the Bottoms area.  We can use some of the bags of compost that we use for concrete framing -- some are falling apart.  And we bought a bag of peat moss, to try to encourage this area to hold water.

 To try to prevent the dirt from falling thru the cracks in the the retaining wall, we have stretched some weed barrier behind the wall before we start putting dirt against it.

A couple of days of just moving the dirt around and we have it partially filled in, beginning to take shape. 

As we continue to excavate dirt from the Bottoms, we can use it to fill and smooth this raised area behind the retaining wall, around the tree.

Rebuilding the West Lawn Bottoms

Excavating the West Lawn Bottoms is part of the solution, but we also need to put it back together.  If the Bottoms grass area is going to be (mostly) level, the stone work along the fence needs to be mostly level too.  It is currently far from level, it slopes down with the fence and the original slope of the land.

And making the side stone work level will require another course of stone work along the border between the Bottoms and the Blue Rock Pool.  Two trips to Whittlesey Landscape Supplies gets 720 pounds of rock ($62.35).

which we can mortar into place.

We will probably need to continue the stone work, but for now we have a start on that, let's look at the larger picture of what we have excavated.

We have a lot of large stone pieces, and we want a stone retaining wall along the left of the above picture, to hold the dirt back around the base of the Oak tree.  So we will stack the rocks that we have, to form a stone retaining wall.  After a day of trial and error, we have a start.

Now we need to dig out more rock, to continue the wall, and dirt, to fill in the pit in front of the wall.

Continuing on this digging, we move all the dirt over out of the way, and continue to dig away.  That exposes a large rock in the lower left corner of the photo below.

Further work exposes the entire piece.

It's much too large to work with, so we break it down into four pieces.

And we can use those rocks to extend the retaining wall.

Excavating the West Lawn Bottom Zone

We want to install a retaining wall, to level the dirt level in the West Lawn both for the big live oak tree and for the River of Rocks as it comes around the corner of the house and heads to the back deck.  The area between the retaining wall and the Jungle will be a lower level as a bed or grassy area, which, since it is at the bottom of the West Lawn, we will call the Bottom Zone.  I have tentatively outlined where I think the retaining wall will go.

We will want to excavate this entire area, so that there is plenty of good dirt for the roots of whatever we end up planting there (grass like the East Lawn, for example).  So we begin by digging up all the dirt, down to bed-rock.

This will take days or weeks.

Two days later, we have a start.  We have stripped the dirt off the top of the section near the fence.  We can not go too far down in a section, because of the French Drain that runs along the fence and ends in the Blue Rock Pool.

But once we are past that point, we can dig all the way down to rock.

On the left it's 17 inches to rock; on the right, it's 21 inches.  It's 8 feet from the left to the right.  All we have to do is extend this excavation to the East.  We have the first 9 feet done; only about 30 feet more to go.

I had almost forgotten how this is done.  First I dig a hole or trench to get down to the depth that I want to be at.  Then I can dig sideways by standing in the trench and extending it to the adjoining area.  For example, we start from this position, and expose a bit of the rock buried under the lawn.

We continue to remove the dirt from the rock, exposing more and more rock at the save level.

The dirt is mixed with leaves and grass and put in the wheelbarrow and taken away to be saved.  When the rock is all removed, the dirt is brought back.

As we did out the rock, there are smaller rocks.  These we put aside in a bucket until we have enough to wheelbarrow all of these smaller rocks around to the front for disposal.  We are trying to improve the soil quality by removing the rocks and adding organic material (leaves, grass, compost), as well as replacing the volume of the rock with better quality dirt.

 With enough digging, we can expose an entire rock.  Most of our rock is broken down into pieces smaller than the kitchen table, although occasionally we will get even larger pieces.  If the rock is too large to be rolled around, I will need to break it into smaller (large) rocks.

The result is a pile of large rocks (too large to lift, but small enough to be rolled around).

 and a pile of dirt which is put off to the side for later. We can get a big pile of dirt from these holes (fluffed up by leaves and grass and air).