Archive for September 26th, 2013

Restoring the DeSoren Aqueduct

Thursday, September 26th, 2013

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 We have slowly been working on bringing our yard up to match our neighbors. But the one big thing that has been the biggest obstacle turned out to be the lack of water. Our property rests under huge pine trees. These trees block most of the rain fall from our property line, and what water does get though is sucked up by the huge pine trees. This has left us with dry, hard acidic soil.

We ran into this problem when we tried to plant some bunch-berry ground cover. Our first attempt ended with half dead plants. The ground was bone dry even after several days of rainfall; the pour plants didn’t stand a chance. So Anthony heavily tilled and improved the soil, replanted and then mulched the top. He then ran the sprinkler hose out to the curb and watered the heck out of the plantings for a week straight. But even now the ground dries up quickly. So a long term solution was needed.

At one time our home was a garden, one of the past owners really took pride in planting flowers and bushes. There are little clues all around the property of its former glory. But the biggest clues are all of the pop up sprinkler heads around the property. The only issue is the sprinkler system doesn’t work. When we moved in we assumed it was dead and would just have to be dug up at some point.

After we removed the spider infested chicken coop, we noticed that when the previous renters built the coop, they did so on top of 2 sprinkler heads. Since the old coop area has been designated for our raspberry garden we knew that the berries would need plenty of water. The idea of using a hose and sprinkler was not a very appealing. Finding these 2 sprinkler heads made us think about trying to resurrect the watering system.

In the back of the house, the main water supply to the irrigation system had been capped off. The PVC pipe line to the water main was broken and discarded carelessly next to the manifold system. But next to back door was a very new looking irrigation system controller, after playing with it for a while we realized that if we could just repair the broken pipe, we might have a working system.

Some other people might measure a project in its length of time to complete, or the total cost. We measure our home projects in the number of trips to Home Depot. Repairing the sprinkler system turned out to be a 5 trip job.

Before we stared we wanted to hook up the lawn hose to the PVC and see if anything would come to life. Our tests showed that the lines did work; we were able to get one of the front yard sprinklers to come to life. But it looks like the manifolds were dead. Some of the motors worked, some just buzzed and they also seemed to be pretty poor shape. So they had to be changed out. This was a bigger job then just fixing one line. So we held off until Sunday to attempt it.

After breakfast, Anthony and Jayme headed down to Home Depot and got our first round of parks. We replaced the main water PVC supply line and added a shut off valve for some extra safety. Then each manifold was cut off and each one replaced with a new one. Joshua came in behind Anthony and Jayme, and began the wiring.

After waiting for all the glue to dry we had our first test. The system is setup into 5 zones. We fired off zone one and all we got was some bubbling out of a single head in the back yard; something is wrong with that line. Luckily it is watering an area we plan to dig up so it was no real loss.

Fired up zone two, nothing happened. Jayme ran all over the front and back yard up he could not find any water. In fact we did not find anything on zone two until later in the day we tried again and part of the hillside opened up. One of the sprinkler heads was broken off and buried.  The PVC was even broken so we made repairs and it appears that zone two is only one sprinkler head. But again, this is an area we plan to dig up and have no need to water at this time.

Fired up zone three, the whole north fence line sputtered to life. This was an area that we really wanted to work, we now can plant some wonderful things along our back fence line and hopefully block a bit of our neighbors yard.

Fired zone four and the back half of the front yard sprang to life. We played with the sprinkler heads and they might have to be replaced. But the line is good! Zone five turned out to be the raspberry garden area and the very front of the front yard. We spend the rest of the day adjusting each of the zones sprayers while Jayme tried to get as wet as possible.

The next weekend we decided to expand the system and cap off the area’s not being used yet. Capping off was easy, but adding the new line was more of a challenge.

We wanted to add one sprinkler head to the front driveway area where Anthony planted the bunchberry. This required adding 30 feet of PVC line, 2 bends and one sprinkler head.

Thankfully Joshua had picked up a pick-axe to plant the blueberries, so digging the 30 foot trench took half the time it would have with shovels. It still took us over 2 hours to dig the line and glue up the parts. But it proved to only be a 1 home depot run job.

By dinner time the trench was filled back in, Jayme and Anthony had cleaned and restored our little rock trim on the driveway and the sprinkler system was covering everywhere we wanted. We celebrated with Burgerville for dinner with raspberry shakes.

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Uncle Sam and the 4th of July

Thursday, September 26th, 2013

sThe Fourth of July has always been a big event at our house. Even before Jayme moved in, we have always gotten excited about the 4th.We are not partiality patriotic, although both sides of our families come with a rich history of military service. But getting all of the family and friends we can over to our house for food and explosions has proven to be very important to us. Perhaps, more than the holiday itself.

This year Uncle Sam made a surprise trip back to Portland. Not sure if it was the 118 degree heat in Phoenix or what, but Sam decided the time was right for a weeklong visit.

Joshua took most of the week off to spend with his brother and Jayme. So on Monday morning,  Anthony headed to work and Joshua took Jayme to the airport for a special breakfast. Jayme was completely unaware that they were going to be picking up Uncle Sam.

In retrospect his might have been a bit mean, as we are sure Jayme was expecting a surprise trip somewhere. Our one clue to his was while he sat in the airport restaurant; Sam walked up behind him and said Hello. First words out Jayme’s mouth was … Ok, but you’re supposed to be Anthony.”

Thankfully, it didn’t take Jayme long to get over any disappointment he might have had as he LOVES his Uncle Sam. A week of no day care, a week of Sam and fireworks…. his little life was too good to be true.

Anthony had to work each day but the three boys got to say home and play. They spent the week having special breakfasts, long bike rides, swimming, hiking Multnomah Falls and bowling. In fact they did so much stuff on the day before the 4th, Jayme asked if it would be ok to go to bed early and he did! Jayme had big week !

cakeOn the big day itself, Anthony awoke early and cooked up two big batches of salads. First, a big tub of Hawaiian mac salad and second a tub of his bacon potato salad. Later after breakfast, Jayme and Sam baked a special 4th of July cake together and Sam baked a loaf (pan?) of focaccia bread.

We spent most of the day inside avoiding the heat. Around 6pm, we cooked up the hamburgers and had our 4th of July feast out on the back patio. While we ate the neighbors started lighting off their illegal fireworks, they shot up way above the pine tree canopy and burst with a large bang. Images of our home and trees aflame danced though our new homeowner’s heads, but luckily, before Joshua could reach his phone, the neighbors stopped.

photo fireWe are super careful when it comes to fireworks. We spray down the street and all of our bushes, create a little launch area with flat stones, have the lawn hose on and ready and a bucket of water. We also have action plan for spent fireworks. We use a large plastic box which we pre-line with a large black trash bag. We fill the bag with water and as each firework is spent, it gets submerged in the water. At the end of the night we pop a hole in the bottom of the bag, drain the water and they throw the bag filled with dead fireworks away.

At 9:00pm as the sunset we headed out to our little launch area. We had expected to have a large gathering this year for fireworks. Last year all of the neighbor kids came over at our old house. In our new home we had thought this would also be the case. But as we headed out, each home in our cul-de-sac was dark, no one was home.

This year, Jayme got to light off the fireworks with Joshua. It took us about an hour to get through all of our fireworks. We ended with a HUGE monster of a firework, video of its launch is online with the photos.

Uncle Sam was with us for 2 more days, leaving on a Saturday afternoon. It was a wonderful holiday and great to spend time with him again. We are hoping he can come up for Xmas!

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Keeping up with the Jones

Thursday, September 26th, 2013

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Before we purchased our new home, one of the main selling points for Jayme was the fact that there was a little man made pond in the front yard. It’s not a very large pond, only about 6 feet across. But each time we would visit the house, Jayme would insist that we turn the pond on so he could play with it. After we moved in, one of our first outdoor projects was fixing the pond.

The pond was very stony, mostly dry and what water was in it was thick and very smelly. A small early spring heat wave dried up the little water left in the pond and gave us our first excuse to start work on the pond.

Anthony and Jayme changed into some dirty clothes, put on some rubber gloves and started to clean out the pond. We had thought there must be a hole in the lining.  Every time Jayme would  fill the pond it would drain out within a few hours. So our goal was to clean out the rock and look for a hole to patch. But as we cleaned it out, we learned what was really going on. The water was not flowing out but down. Our shallow rocky pond turned out to be about 4 feet deep filled with rocks and gravel. The pond seemed dry, but only the top inch of exposed rocks was dry.

It took two weekends to hand lift all the rocks and gravel out of the pond and reach the plastic liner. It was a mucky smelly mess! But after cleaning and filling the pond liner, we found zero holes. It was a very pleasant surprise.

Over a few weeks, we made a few trips to different nurseries and before we knew it we had a great little pond, no fish but we had several frogs move in.

With the pond clean we now had a new problem, what to do with the piles of river rock we dug out to the pond. In the end we decided to artistically lay it in strips down our driveway. Sort of dry river bed effect, Anthony moved a few bigger rocks down and the front yard was starting to take shape.

It was about then that our neighbor ordered several yards of black mulch and mulched his front yard and gardens. Our little weedy adjoining hill and pond rocks seemed to just scream eye-sore; so we headed to Home Depot and purchased some lawn weed fabric and 20 bags of mulch. Anthony and Jayme also picked up 2 small huckleberry bushes which should grow to about 8 feet in height and help hide our fence (a future project).

We spent the weekend laying the weed block and raking mulch, but by the time we finished we had a very respectable looking hill adjoining our neighbors amazing yard.

Our front yard is MASSIVE, with all of our work only about 1/8th of the front yard is now presentable. But still the neighbors liked what we did so much that they bought some rocks for their driveway to match ours. Who knew we were trend setters!

We still need to removed several small trees and bushes, expand Jayme Pond, plant some grass and fix the sprinkler system! But we feel that we are no longer a huge embarrassment for the neighbors.

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