It is April school vacation week here at Henbogle. As is our wont, we are spending much of the week on outdoor projects. One eagerly anticipated project is some improvements to our water system. Several years ago, we buried a plastic water line running to the back garden using pipe we purchased at a yard sale. We had enough pipe to run the line to the end of the freestanding deck. We continued the line using ordinary garden hose, and it has worked great.
We ran garden hose all the way to the garden sink, adding a post with a spigot for a hose to the garden, and later added a dedicated buried line to the hoop house. This worked fantastically well, no more dragging the hose out of the way for the mower, but watering in the garden still meant dragging a h
ose over the fence or through a gate and snaking around the raised beds, a pain for the gardener and dangerous for the plants.
Last year, we saw more of the plastic pipe at the town dump (aka transfer station). Following our tradition of dump picking, we snagged it, awaiting the need to replace the garden hose line. Sure enough, when we turned the water on a few days ago, the old garden hose was leaking, so it meant it was time to replace it with the plastic pipe. We decided while we are at it,we might as well move the spigot to give room to expand the compost bins, and we are also going to add a spigot in the garden at the end of the hoophouse, splicing the buried line that runs to the hoop house. This will be much easier to use for watering in the vegetable garden.
Unfortunately we need to run the pipe through the middle of a nasty, thuggish, multiflora rose bush today, that will be fun. We’ve been hacking away at the rose over time, but this one is the biggest of them, and starts on our neighbors’ property, so we’ve been a bit slower at getting rid of it. It does make for good cover for the birds, who fly straight to it whenever a neighborhood cat comes calling, so I do feel a tiny bit of reluctance to get rid of it altogether. Nonetheless, we’ll hack away more today, and I hope have a new spigot in the garden before lunch. At times like this I love being handy.
Yesterday I pulled the last of the remaining leeks from the garden. They were small but exceptionally sweet and tender. I cleaned and sliced them, then cooked them slowly until nicely caramelized to go atop a pizza. I also used the last of my frozen pesto on a potato pesto pizza, mmmm.
