Yard, matey.

Well, we finally decided to start adding something to the yard, since we have finished taking out pretty much everything we didn't want. We went to Lowe's and got some cool greenery to go under the tree out front, and dropped it in yesterday. Here's how it all went:

There's my lovely wife digging in the dirt. It was that rich black soil pretty much all the way down. I think after about a foot, it started turning to clay, but that's a lot of darn good soil.

Here's the peony we got to replace the rose bush. It looks pretty darned good there, and I think it will do well. Even though the front of our house is the north side, we get a fair bit of sun up there. Not too much for shady plants, but enough for partial sun guys and maybe some full sun. We'll just have to experiment and see what does well.

Yes, that shovel is as badass as it looks. I have to chain it up at night so I don't wake up to corpses scattered around the driveway. Also, it digs holes real good. We decided that this little rock area in front of the steps needed something, and we both love little boxwood shrubs. We got three of them ($5 each at Lowe's) and dropped them in.

Yay, shrubs! That watering can is a new acquisition, too. Costco was short on plants, but they had some good garden tools and goodies. I got three new pairs of leather gloves, so I'll have backups for when I have a glove blowout going 75 MPH down my back fence.

Sorry for the blurriness, but the picture isn't that interesting anyway. It's just to show you that I tagged one of the sprinkler lines with my shovel (He dug too greedily, and too deep). I'm going to pretend I did it on purpose just so I could show you how to fix a broken sprinkler line. Clever of me, huh?

This was the first attempted fix. Terrible plan. This has those Gator Bite teeth in it, so it's supposed ot be a push-on solution, but it only works with some of the newer pipes. Mine are the old blue-stripe style, and they need something a little more old school.

I cut these off cleanly, and I probably took too much off. The less you take off the better on this stuff.

This is the patch piece. They have them in all different sizes, but I think the standard for sprinkler lines (big ones, not the tiny feeder lines) is 1/2". Get one of these. If you really screw up, you can probably find a longer one, or cobble something together using a few of them and some spare line.

Stick this in, but not too far. Getting it out again is a huge pain. I had some vegetable oil handy to get it slick in case it didn't want to go, but these were pretty easy. I've helped my dad work on my sister's sprinklers and they were really ornery. These went in just fine.

Get a couple hose clamps and slip them on before you put the connector into the other end. You can get most any size, but you should probably get the smallest ones that will fit comfortably on the hose so you don't have to spend a week tightening them.

Tighten these suckers down really hard. These clamps are going to keep you from leaking, so go to town on them. There we go. I turned the little valve in my sprinkler box (so handy to know about) and I had no leaks, which is really all a man can ask for.

Now that the pipe is fixed, I can put in the drippers. You'll need some 1/4" feeder line, first. Make sure it says feeder, not soaker or dripper. Some of them will have holes in them and some are made of this weird stuff that just lets water soak right through the pipe. You'll also need some of these:

And some of these:

We got 2 GPH drippers because we only have the drip system on for about 10 minutes. Hopefully that will be enough water for everyone. If not, you can always turn the drip system on for longer, or change out the drippers themselves.

Poke a small hole in your water line. I used a tiny screwdriver, but an awl would work fine, too. There's water spraying out of here because the lines were still full from my leak test. It didn't slow me down or anything, so don't worry about it too much if yours leaks.

 Take one of the little pokey plug things and just poke it into the hole. It seems overly simple, but it works.

Cut a length of the feeder line to reach from your main line to the roots of the plant. Grab a dripper. Put them together.

That's the way!

Now push the feeder tube onto the pokey deal and you're all done. Your drippers will drip and your plants will grow. Hooray! This whole project seriously takes like a minute, so there's no reason not to do it. Adding more outlets to your sprinkler system is really easy and a great way to minimize your maintenance in your yard. When we build our raised garden beds, we're totally running sprinklers through it and tying them into this system.

Look how cute our little bushes are! Boxwoods are great shrubs. These are called Dwarf English Boxwoods and they're supposed to get 3-5' tall and 3-5' wide. The best part about boxwoods is that they're evergreens, so they'll still look good in the winter. The other best part is that they are hedge-worthy, so you can clip them into cool shapes if you want. Way cool!

This is our little planter all done. The grasses there are really neat. They have little seeds on the end of each strand so they sort of look like fiber optics. We also planted some English Ivy next to the tree so it can climb the trunk. The rest are a couple little groundcover dudes. Some Aurea Irish Moss and some Blue Star Creeper. We're hoping it'll all mound up and get little tiny flowers on it. That's what it's supposed to do, anyway.

So there we are. Here's our great new front yard:

Thanks for reading!