Fixing irrigation hose pipes

I’m not a church goer, but there is something about taking a load of junk to the council tip and launching it into the separate bins that makes you feel healed and cleansed. And very good.

I took my shiny halo with me to town and had a celebratory hot chocolate with Manou and Lydia in the cafe on the main square.  The place was heaving with the Easter crowds.

And after coming back I decided to keep up the good works by doing something that has been on my To Do list for about eight months. Adapting the irrigations hoses in the potager.

Which is shocking. Eight months. I’ll have to go back in my notebook and lovingly tick the job off the list for every page it has appeared at the top of the Garden Task list for every month of the year.

What? You don’t retro tick your jobs? At least I didn’t write it in and then immediately cross it off.

For my Jubilee birthday last year my husband bought me the irrigation kit.  It required fiddly assembly as I have seventeen beds that needed at least two leaky hoses per bed. Some of them three.

To get the leaky hoses to each bed you need the connecting hoses. And they snake all over the place.

And they have been snaking over the central path as I didn’t chop the leaky hoses and bury little connecting hoses in between.  Talk about a trip hazard. I have been picking my way through hoses all last season.

If you were thinking of designing any paths in your garden, might I suggest you make them wider than you thought you need.  These ones on the east west axis are too narrow. And it’s too late to deconstruct them and start again.  So I tend to walk along the north south axis which can take me and a wheelbarrow and don’t offer trip hazards every few feet.

So bouyed up after a great visit to town – I set to work.

And this is not a pretty look.  I had to lift off all the bark chips that cover the central path; heave on the weedproof fabric that has been down for years and years and get it off.  Connect the leaky hose to the connecting hose. Bury the darn thing. Reconnect it to the other side. Repeat about 30 times. And then relay the path.

It’s no oil painting. But at least it is neater.  And now all I need to do is turn on the automatic watering system for the first time this year.

At least now the cellar where the only tap for the garden is located is sparkling clean and orderly.  It might almost be a joy to duck my head under the stone lintel and creep in to the deep dark cave.