The best laid plans....

Not to say we have good plans. In fact, I have been thinking about making a whole section titled The Hall of Poor Ideas.  I will say that one of our strengths, together and separately, is the ability to roll with it. To make lemonade, if you will.

Two days ago we were presented with an opportunity wearing the disguise of a setback.  Some of you may remember this post from September 2010 when we put a water hydrant in the yard. This has served as our only water since that day and has served us well. That is, until several days ago when the entire she-bang broke in Johns hand. We have been putting pressure on a plastic joint underground and we failed to give the hydrant a support and so the plastic snapped and the hydrant pulled out of the ground and the area flooded.  Yep. The Hall of Poor Ideas. Maybe a better title is the Collection of we-had-no-idea-what-we-we-doing. Whatever it is called, that first water hydrant belongs there.

After some consideration and dirt kicking we decided to take this golden opportunity to not only fix our mistakes but to also move the water hydrant. We intended to bring water to the greenhouse eventually so now was the perfect time. While we were at it, we added a second hydrant close to the orchard and a main line headed towards the house foundation. We were not planning to do this anytime soon but....  Lemonade.

This is our new main water line side by side with the amazing conglomeration that was our first try.

I actually had a lady tell me that she might put this in her yard as sculpture but she surely would not use if for a water line.  Awesome.  Now we have a brand new metal piece system that I am sure will hold up to the amount of pressure coming at it.

We did have some trouble this time around getting the parts to be drip free and when I went to the hardware store to get a new part I learned that metal parts and plastic parts don't really like each other very much. The threads don't line up well and the plastic is easy to strip going into the metal. I bought a metal nipple heading into the connector and, voila, no more drips.  This basic knowledge would have saved us about 3 hours of drip trouble-shooting.

Here are the steps taking the water to the greenhouse.

Our lovely neighbor, Dane, has a tractor with a backhoe and he is always willing to help us out at very little cost. John and I often joke that the advertisement for our land should have included " neighbor has back-hoe".  This project would have taken us a week of digging but the entire adventure lasted only two days.  God love Dane.

Finally, here is our new hydrant near the orchard. You can see we cut the bottom out of a 5 gallon bucket and submerged it with the hydrant and a 4 x4 treated post. The bucket is filled with gravel to create it's own little infiltration pit. The post will keep the hydrant from rocking and putting pressure on the plastic connector deep in the ground ( meaning, hopefully, we should not have to do this again).

We have also been rocking on our list of things to do and knocking them out.  John is dying to tell you all about the shop infiltration pit and I can not wait to show you our completed list. It will all get done before our honeymoon to Puerto Rico! We leave in ten days! AHH!