Fixing Leaks and T-Posts in the Garden

Monday Morning during chores I noticed this.

Actually, I heard it from twenty feet away. It sounded like a toilet flushing. When I went to look, I saw water bubbling up out of the ground.

I thought, “Dang it. I have to do a pipe repair today.”

But first, breakfast. Evie had made pound cake the previous afternoon, and she whipped up some fresh whipped cream. It was a very popular breakfast.

Then we had to do school. The older kids are finishing up the dregs of the school year, but Winnie saw her new school books and she can’t wait until next year to start them, so she did school too. She is not sure she likes the concept of having to follow instructions. School would be much more fun without that.

Then we needed to prep the duck for supper.

Finally in the afternoon we got back to the farm and I was able to uncover the leak.

It turns out this elbow joint had come apart.

Did it come apart because of frost cracking the connection? Because I used the crappy plastic elbows? Because of gremlins?

No. It came apart because I forgot to crimp the ring when I put it together. Oops. Oh well. That was a quick fix.

Didn’t have much time left before violin lesson, so I jumped on a new phase of the garden infrastructure.

This was something we did last year to help support the wheat when it got too heavy. We placed T-posts every ten feet along the row on both sides. This also allowed us to raise the soaker hoses up off the ground to get it out of range of rodents (the voles like to chew through the sprinkler hoses to get at the water.)

This didn’t take very long, 12 posts in 20 minutes or so. I think I have designed a very cheap and durable cross brace for the top too, so that is something I will test out in a few weeks. Ideally each of the rows will eventually have these T-posts, we will be able to use them to support shade cloth or clear low or high tunnel film.

We do need to be cautious about pounding the pickets on the west sides of the rows because that is where the pex pip runs, and if we aren’t careful we could pound a hole in the pex pip.

I pulled the occultation frame off this 10 foot section of row 5, and I was quite pleased with the results. there were a whole bunch of dead and dying weed shoots under it. We’ll watch it over the next week or so, and see what pops up, and then plant cabbage, brussels sprout and kale in succession fashion.

At least, that’s the theory. We’ll see how much time we actually get for it.