mostlygardening

I’ve been busy working outside. Not so busy taking pictures or writing. Time to play catchup. This is bed 1 (far) and bed 2 (near). This past weekend I replaced the drippers in bed 1 and finished the system in bed 2.

I also did bed 6.

Bed 6 gave me the roughest time, but I also learned the most. My FIL has worked with this stuff quite a bit and he said how much easier it is to work with it when it’s warm. Not a problem this weekend…it was in the 90’s. But while the heat makes it easier to push the tubing into the L and T fittings, it makes it difficult to punch the holes for the drippers. I found, through trial and error, that when the tubing is hot, it just dents. And then it’s hard to put the punch in exactly the same spot when you realize that it didn’t punch all the way through. But sometimes there’s enough of a hole that when you do put the dripper in, the water squirts out from underneath through that first, not so good hole. Ugh.

I ‘did’ most of bed 6 on Saturday, but was left with water squirting out through lots of those extra-sort-of holes. So Sunday morning I headed out to get some straight connectors and I patched the one strip where that had happened on the drippers at both ends. This was when the trick of cutting the tubing, and marking the spots for the holes, then bringing it into the house to cool down to punch the holes, and then returning it out to heat up before connecting the fittings came about.

But by Sunday evening, I only had two more beds to plumb. After that, I’ll have someone in to connect all the beds to my valve. And I just got the name of someone new that I’m excited to try out.