One bed we are planning on doing is around our screen porch. The most important thing in this bed is going to be a water feature. We want to put in a bubbler rock (basically it's a rock with a hole drilled through it that you can hook up to a pump to push out water). Besides looking cool, it's something the kids can play on. Besides that we are planning on a flagstone path, lots of plants, and some mulch.
When we had our irrigation system put in, we didn't have any beds planned yet, though we knew we'd probably want something near the patio being built. So our contractor put in a line for another zone but didn't install any of the sprinklers since we didn't know where we wanted them exactly.
So, our first step for this bed was to install sprinklers. While we were in Milwaukee, Brian planned out where to put sprinkler heads so we could get the best coverage for this bed.
On Friday night we dug up the end of the line that our contractor installed ...
and a rotary lawn sprinkler that we needed to move to make sure we knew what we needed to buy at Lowe's the next morning.
After shopping and getting everything we needed on Saturday morning, we dug up the existing lines we needed to move and in some trenches that the contractor had already done where we planned to add some of our PVC.
Then we started digging in areas that had not been dug in before. And after about 20 minutes, we decided to go to Home Depot and rent a trencher.
Once we got the hang of the trencher, it was SO MUCH EASIER. Look at what we were digging through! No wonder it was so difficult!
There were still a few places we had to dig by hand, but we were able to do the majority with the trencher and it went pretty quick.
Originally we had hoped to finish everything on Saturday, but we were spent by the time we had to return the trencher and decided to hold off on installing any piping and sprinklers until Sunday. It probably didn't help that I ran 7 miles on Saturday morning either (I have a 9 mile trail race in a few weeks that I'm training for).
Our one break for the weekend was a back-to-school block party in the alley behind our house. I took all of one picture.
We had fun though meeting more of our neighbors and watching our kids run around with all the older kids.
On Sunday morning I worked on cleaning up some of our trenches while Brian installed the PVC.
We had to move two existing rotary lawn sprinklers as well as the black drain pipes that attach to the downspouts on our screen porch.
For the new bed, we installed 11 pop-up sprinklers.
The kids were being too helpful so we eventually got smart and set up the DVD players we use for car trips in the screen porch. (They were really good at filling in holes that we didn't want filled in yet.)
After finally getting everything installed, I finished burying all the PVC while Brian mowed the lawn. As it should, it doesn't even really look like we did anything.
I was a little nervous when we started the zone up to test it, but all the sprinklers worked perfectly!
Doing this project made us realize that having someone else install the rest of our irrigation system was worth every penny (we had considered doing it ourselves). It was hard work and we are still extremely sore. We can't wait to dig the hole for the water feature!
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