Spring! Part Deux

The sprinkler head replacement continued this weekend. Travis wrapped up the last zone of sprinkler heads. And today it rained (well sprinkled). How fitting yet ironic.

We continued marching down the list of gardening chores. We put some Goodwin Creek Lavender and Blue Fescue along the mow strip last year. One of the lavender was the unfortunate victim of (I believe) dog pee and half succumbed. The other half of it has been slowly making a recovery but it looks withered and sad next to the rest of our lavender which simply exploded over the last year. We went to the nursery looking for its replacement but they weren't in stock so they'll be ordering some for us. The Trident Maple we put in have likewise taken hold. Travis was like an anxious new parent fretting over these maples earlier this year until they finally budded and put out new growth. Some pictures to illustrate what a difference a year makes.

2010	2011

One of our chores last weekend was to add some edging around this mow strip. The soil clay in our mow strip is pretty high and the mulch has a tendency to spill over the sidewalk and run away with the wind. We decided some edging was in order and cleaned out the supply of Ultra-Edge from the Home Depots in the Tri-City area. That's right -- we hit up 3 Home Depots and confused Travis's credit card company into thinking someone had jacked his card and was going on a landscaping-spree.

We also laid down some fresh cocoa shell mulch. I must say, the smell is just as intoxicating as it was last year. It almost made the work enjoyable just to be able to smell sweet sweet chocolate while you're spreading mulch. The manufacturer recommends spraying it down with water to help the shells curl and lock together which also has the side effect of releasing extra chocolately-goodness.

The final thing on our list was to put the summer vegetables into the ground. Travis offered to build me tomato cages this year as the ones I bought last year gave in about half-way through the season and I declared I was done with cheap metal cages. Being the engineer that he is, Travis set out to make me tomato cages to last a lifetime.

The previous owner had bequeathed us some scrap wood in the garage rafters. Travis made use of these so the measurements were chosen to waste as little of the boards as possible. I'm sure you can fudge most of them without problems.

First, he ripped the 3/4" thick boards (the only measurement that you shouldn't fudge) into 1-1/2" wide strips. These strips will come together to form a rectangular frame with two protruding legs. They are cut into 4' and 1-1/2' lengths. So 2 long and 2 short lengths will make one panel where 1 short length is not mounted flush. He cut a 1/4" notch into the center of the 3/4" face of every strip by running it over the table saw twice - once in each direction -- with the rip fence set at 1/4" (hence the non-fudgeability of 3/4"). If you have a stacked dado, that would be ideal and easier but prettiness of the notch is unimportant.

Travis found concrete reinforcement mesh to be installed inside each frame -- it's a 10-gauge, steel, 6"-by-6"  mesh. For each panel, you want to trim out 3 by 6 holes making about 1-1/2'-by-3'. He picked up some small bolt cutters for this job.

The steel mesh fits pretty snugly into the 1/4" notch cut into the wood strips. Give it a tap with a hammer to drive some of the cut ends of the steel wire into the frame and screw together with some kind of coated screw (like decking screws) that are corrosion resistant. Travis drilled pilot holes first. He also trimmed the ends of the legs into spikes to better drive into the ground.

Then he added 4 1-5/8" eye hooks to each frame. 2 hooks on each of the 4-foot sections. The eye hooks can be placed about 2 inches from the end of the frame. As long as all the panels have the eye hooks placed in the same position, they'll be easy to use together.

The panels can be arranged together in different configurations such as the square here. You can easily do a double square as well (hint: one of the walls is shared.) The eye hooks allow a 6' landscaping stake to be driven through to hold the frame together. The spiky legs also help with stabilizing the structure.

In my garden, we're using a diamond/double-triangle formation for each pair of tomato plants. We planted one pair this last weekend and will put in another pair in a month to stagger harvests. We're doing a lean-to for the cucumber plants. We'll be adding some finer mesh to the panels for the cucumber plants as we're aiming for a this kind of trellis.

Close up of threading the stakes through the eye hooks to secure and support the structure.

For the lean-to, Travis used pipe clamps as stoppers for the eye hooks. The pipe clamps are easily positionable and can be removed when you don't need them on the stake.

Our pair of tomatoes. In the background are the Brussels sprouts that I got into the ground very late last year which have suddenly taken. I can't decide whether I should leave them be and and give them a chance to be harvested (they seem to have sprout buds) or just yank them out for the space. I'm not even sure if they'll like spring.

Our pair of Japanese extra-long cucumbers. I swapped  the positions of the cukes versus tomatoes this year. Planting the same thing in the same place year after year deprives the soil of nutrients specific to the plant so your plants don't do as well and tend to engender disease.

There's some finishing tasks left to be done. One is spray-painting the steel wire to help ward off corrosion. Travis also thought of filling the bottom channel where the steel wire slipped into the notch with some expanding glue or 2-part-epoxy to prevent water from collecting and corroding things.

In honor of tax day

So I take pride in having my act together and getting my taxes done early. I filed back at the end of February. I blame it on my OCD. It stresses me out a lot less just to get it figured out so I can cross it off my to-do list. I finally caved last year and started using TurboTax to do my taxes. A tiny part of me from my Chinese upbringing feels a twinge of shame for having to admit that considering taxes never veer anywhere north of basic second grade arithmetic. There's not even any long division for goodness-sakes.

I digress. The point is, we were on the tax credits section and this screen came up.

Umm...that's ok TurboTax.  I get the hint. I'll pass on trying to take that credit.

P.S. 100th post. Kinda fitting.

Spring!

We had a week and a half of sunny California mid-70's recently announcing the arrival of spring. I was so ecstatic that the dreary rainy winter was finally over, I ran around the house turning off the heater and turning on the sprinklers to rejoice. Then the weather gods threw a week of windy, blustery cold plus some hail last Thursday night at us. I'm convinced the weather gods were just trying to stick it to me.

But turning on the sprinklers revealed, once again, some of our sprinkler heads in the front yard were incapacitated. Every year, the first time we want to turn on our sprinklers, we have to go around with a little screw driver clearing the dead grass out of the pop-ups. Our heads in the front yard are god-knows-how-many-years old. We were shocked to find that those little brass heads still worked when we bought the house. Having resurrected the backyard last year, we'd survived long enough on the puny little sprayers and it was time to do something about them.

So Travis started digging. We both expected the risers to be PVC. We were wrong. This meant he had to dig all the way down to the laterals to splice in new heads.

And he had to dig very carefully. After all, we've spent plenty of labor and money to revive the grass out front -- killing weeds and filling in bald spots. So he had to peel out the lawn carefully so we could place it all back when we were done.

Of course, Pixie pitched in by supervising whenever I wasn't available to do so.

And these are what he dug out of the ground.

Let me clarify a little with a closeup. Those clumps you see on the risers aren't dirt. Travis has cleaned all the dirt off. The risers were most likely galvanized steel. This is what happens when galvanized steel is buried in soil -- wet soil that receives rain and irrigation -- for god-knows-how-many-years. In case you still haven't caught on yet, those clumps are rust and corrosion. Kids -- this is why you shouldn't use galvanized steel to run water lines. Ever. Or in places with high humidity. Ever. Or both. Duh.

And here's a closeup of the reason we have to go around cleaning out pop-ups every year. The head only manages to pop about an inch up. If we get lazy about mowing the grass in the middle of the summer, there's plenty of growth in one week to obscure the spray, giving us very odd watering patterns on the front lawn.

But have no fear. Travis is replacing these heads one-by-one with some elbow grease, a few PVC T's and elbows, and a bit of PVC cement. We got these Hunter heads from a specialty irrigation and landscaping supply store, Ewing, our landscaper referred us to. Travis is convinced these are higher quality than what you get at Home Depot. (They are what we have installed in the backyard but a wider diameter. I can at least attest that I've been very pleased with them.) He finished up one zone and tested it out this weekend. He'll wrap up the second zone next weekend. No leaks so far at least.