Vince’s Project

Poor Vince! He’s had a lot of plumbing type projects lately.

When he originally put the irrigation lines in the garden, we weren’t real sure how we were going to arrange things. We ended up with the elderberries, blackberries, a permanent raised bed for turmeric and ginger, and two permanent beds for asparagus. That’s all in one corner and probably takes up a bit less than 1/4th of the garden space but the irrigation for that area can be set up permanently since he doesn’t ever till or do any more digging in that area.

He had one “master” faucet there and when he was hauling some dirt in, he noticed it had been leaking underground because that area was wet. He dug it all out and messed with it messed with it. Every time he’d fix one part, something else would break. I think that was just a bad setup from the beginning so after days of messing with it, waiting for the everything to set up, turn the water on, find another leak, find another break, he finally said “forget it!” He didn’t really need that faucet there so he capped it off, filled in the hole and it’s history.

You never know why people do the things they do when they build a house. This one really has us wondering what they were thinking on so many levels. One crazy thing is the light/fan switch for the master bedroom. You know when you walk into a room, the switch is just inside the room? Nope, not here, it’s about 18″ from the door. For nine years, every time I flip that switch on or off, I wonder . . why? I’m sure there was a reason – either they changed the door location, which I’m not sure how that could have happened because you’d almost walk into the kitchen from the master bedroom but . . who knows.

Another crazy thing is that when moved here, there was one outside faucet out by the RV hookups. There’s a faucet on the east and west side of the house – the type that are attached to the house but the water that comes out of them goes through the water softener. It was crazy that all the watering we were doing was with softened water so Vince dug new lines from the well and put in one faucet on the east side of the front yard and started a faucet on the west side of the front yard.

It was about eight years ago that he started that project. I’m not complaining. There’s always more to do around here than one man can possibly get done. That hole had been there for a couple of years and then I asked him to either finish the faucet or fill the hole because I was afraid someone (me probably) was going to walk into it not paying attention and break their neck so he mostly filled it in.

Yesterday after giving up on the leaking faucet, he dug out the hole for the yard faucet and has it almost finished. That will be the faucet we use for the chicken coop (#1) and for watering my potted plants. He will hook into that faucet for an irrigation line to the peach trees and the big fig tree, all of which are on the west side of the house and not in the orchard. That reminds me . . and I probably should not have thought about it, but the peach trees are not inside the fenced orchard. It’s just a matter of time til the deer find those trees! So far . . we’ve been lucky.

That reminds me of a story – The first time I went to Vince’s house in GA, it was a beautiful two story Georgian type home but with no flowers. I told Vince — we have to plant flowers! It was fall so we went somewhere – I can’t remember where and bought several flats of pansies and fall blooming flowers. Vince had apple trees in his yard and they were full of apples.

That evening he and I worked our tails off planting all those flowers. The next morning we left very early to go to a state part a couple of hours away. We spent the day in that area, sightseeing with Vince showing me the beauty of north Georgia. We got home at dusk and I was so ready to drive up and see what a difference all those blooming flowers made to the way the house looked. WHAT?? Someone had stolen all the flowers we planted – every last one of them. I couldn’t believe it. Vince lived in a very nice neighborhood. Who would have done this? Then we looked over to see a whole herd of deer eating apples of his apple trees. The deer had eaten every single flower we planted . . just pulled them completely out of the ground, where they had spent less than 24 hours. We did not try planting more flowers at that house.

Let’s hope they don’t do that to those peach trees on the side of our house.