Will it Rain?

Sometimes it takes me forever to get around to doing something new. If I've done it before, I tend to just heave a sigh, commit and go. If not, I go pathetically slow.

Today it was finally 'drip system' day. It's actually comprised of low volume sprinklers, not a true drip, but it was ideal for the rock garden, which is just under the maximum 600 square feet that the system can handle. After edging the grass side of the rock garden (a good delay tactic) and some weeding (yet another excellent stalling technique) I finally got out the 1/2" main line and strung it through the garden's backbone, the highest point on the slope. Then I read the instructions again. If you read the instructions often enough, it's possible to stall out on the work progress until dark. But it wasn't dark by the time I stopped reading. The fact that I started reading just after lunch time and that the instruction book is only 50 pages long and comprises mostly of illustrations and that many of the pages were not relevent to my situation probably has something to do with it. I set out my stakes and screwed in the little sprinkler heads, pointing them in roughly the direction I expected they'd need to point. and then I got the 1/4" feeder lines. At this point I almost read the instructions again, but severe boredom with the booklet was setting in. I got the punch thingy and started at the lowest end--since I left myself slack, if I made a mistake, I could just cut off the end and try again. But the punchy thingy turned out to be super easy to use. In about twenty minutes I had all the feeder lines in, the sprinklers hooked up, and bam. I flushed the system and then turned it on.

And it worked!

Now I want to set up the other dry places where I have to hand water. There's a couple that I couldn't justify a system because they're so small--I'll pick up a soaker hose for them. But the rest I'll get a drip system set up for them. Now, I could save a heap of money and just keep hand watering. I've got the hand watering areas down to a minimum. There's just one catch.

When we go to Victoria at the end of September, will it rain? If it doesn't the whole time we're gone, the garden will have to be watered. If it's hot, it'll have to be watered several times. Whoever ends up playing caretaker for the house needs to have a simple way to take care of the watering without memorizing where the important plants are among all the weeds. Once upon a time when a good friend played house sitter for us, we went for a walk around the place (it was all hand water back then) and he took notes and I was sure all the important bits would get done. There wasn't nearly as much developed and most of what was developed was in discreet, clear sections. Now some of those areas are overgrown or in partial use, like the veggie garden where some of the areas are fallow and others are in use and you can't always tell one apart from the other. And there are plants on slopes that need to be watered slowly or the runoff will strip away the topsoil, exposing their roots. I can't expect someone to stand there with the waterer in flat or mist mode, watching the water very slowly soak in.

The answer is to get as much of this stuff on water systems where the settings are correct for the plants' needs, and then our caretaker can just go from section to section, plug in the hose, water for a few minutes (or a half hour in the case of the soaker hoses) and then move on.

Or maybe it'll just rain and it won't be an issue. Then it'll just be a matter of feed the animals and go back home. Or go back to watching movies, if we have a house sitter, which would be the ideal. The place is more self-sufficient than it used to be, so a house sitter isn't an absolute necessity like it once was, but I'd sleep easier knowing that someone is there to quiet the dogs if they're barking at night or they'll hear a goat bawling if one gets stuck, etc.

Most of all, though, I hope it rains. At least a little. Because even when it's all set to go, it'll be a long chore. Mother Nature does a much more thorough job than the sprinklers and soaker hoses, too.