Irrigation Zone B3

Apologies for boring you with repeated posts about small elements of large projects this summer, but I'd like to say a word about the final leg of the large labors with the irrigation system I'm designing and installing here at the Roediger House.

I've managed to drone on about how challenging it is to dig on this lovely old downtown lot, thanks to Piedmont red clay, gravel, buried debris, and roots.

There is a narrow strip of azaleas and a few other bushes along the south property line, on the far side of the driveway, that I figured I should supply with irrigation as long as I was doing the rest of the yard.

But with the large parking lot separating that area from the water source, I was either going to have to run a long hose from a connection point in the back yard close to the house, or I was going to have to install a PVC line in the ground.

I opted for the latter, not realizing it would take eight pretty full days of digging and chopping and pickaxe-ing and soil-screening to get it done.

I've bitched and moaned about the difficulties in some recent blog posts but you can see I'm dedicating this post to being a bit of a photographic record of this part of the summer undertaking.

Which almost necessitated an undertaker, as in: half-way to six feet under. That's how far I had to dig down to make a gravel drain beneath a 2-foot frost-free hydrant, to which I'll connect the azalea drip lines eventually.

As of mid-July, all the trenches for running the PVC water lines have now been dug and almost all of the pipes have been cemented and connected and reburied. And that yard hydrant is now set and ready.

Here's what remains: water meter installation; backflow preventer inspection; final connections of the PVC water lines from the service point within the property; ordering all the drip irrigation components; installation and connection of the smart controller for the automatic valves; completing the short run to create a drip system to service hanging baskets and planter containers; flushing and testing the system; setting and adjusting all the rotary spray heads; and setting, flushing and testing the drip irrigation zones. So, I ain't done, by a long stretch, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm glad that the hardest labors of this project are pretty much over.