Sprinklers
I had “fun” rotovating (rototilling) our back garden a few weekends ago. I rented the largest one I could find, and it only managed to dig down six inches in our soil! I did my entire parents’ garden to a depth of 12-18 inches all over, but this thing couldn’t easily go any further. The trouble is that it had a very powerful engine, so the blades would dig in and it would drag me across the garden very quickly!
The following week I thought it’d be even more fun to rent a bigger machine. Yes, it’s basically a chainsaw on wheels. If I had to design a machine to dig a trench in the ground, I have to say I would not have come up with this:
It did the job of digging trenches for the sprinkler system, but the ground was so hard that digging down to a depth of 18 inches meant that it kept stalling every 20 minutes or so. It was really hard work, but Clyde (Amber’s mum’s boyfriend) did most of the driving as he used to do this for a living. We also put 30 bags of compost on the garden to help the grass take hold when we lay it.
Finally, we ran all the pipes for the sprinkler system and teed the new feed off the supply pipe for the front sprinkler’s valve box. It involved a lot of digging by hand, but it got done in the end. Of course, two out of the seven valves leaked, but who would have expected a valve company to have less than a 29% failure rate on their signature product?
