Keep Digging

How the pandemic helped me to find my peace with yard work.

Spring is upon us, and with that comes keeping up the grounds. That means, mowing the lawn, trimming it, and fixing anything else that needs fixing. But I was not expecting to fix this:

I know, Medium didn’t preserve the aspect ratio of a picture taken in portrait mode from my phone. If you know how to fix this, let me know.

I have a leaky sprinkler line. It seemed like it was the sprinkler head, so I replaced it with this last week:

With a bit of cropping, this one came out better.

I figured that’s it, right? Sorry. Not sorry. That didn’t fix the leak:

Here the picture was taken in landscape and the aspect ratio is correct. But the leak remains here.

My weekend wasn’t supposed to go like this. See that tee in the middle over the puddle? My leak was there. I had feared though, that the tee connected to a riser from an even deeper pipe. It was not. Actually, that little black ring you see there at the bottom of the tee is a drainage valve. The drainage valve releases pressure in the sprinkler lines. Without that, we could have more leaks.

Unfortunately, my plans to relax for the weekend after mowing the lawn and vacuuming the house were not to be. I needed to deal with that leak and the puddles growing from it before the wasps determined that it was their watering hole and that they could set up a hotel nearby.

We had known about the puddle of water for some time now, but we thought that was forming just because the land was not graded right. We’d run the sprinklers and the grass at that end of the yard would be all muddy. Turns out, he did grade it right. The problem was, that for the 3 years since we had the lawn and the sprinklers installed, there was a leak in the valve.

This is not how I wanted to spend my Saturday, digging in the dirt. I wanted to call a pro to do it for us. I sent a text to two landscaping companies listed in the area nearby. “Booked for the next 3 weeks” and “no response” were clear indicators of one thing: I had to do it myself. My wife removed all doubt when she could not find someone in her network of Vietnamese friends to do the job the same day.