From Start to Finish!

It's been a busy week for John and I. He got home from a 3 week trip to Alaska one week ago today, and since then (as always) life hasn't been boring! We made it to an Arizona Diamondbacks game on Monday night when they played against the SF Giants. It made up for the missed game on our honeymoon... We did the Coastal California tour for our honeymoon and for our day in San Francisco, he had gotten tickets to a baseball game.. Well, we had just come from Napa Valley and I caught a nasty bug and ended up with a violent vomiting episode during the drive up and John caught it and was up all night! So we still have the unused tickets to remind us.

John took the week off of work because he's still got the backyard looming over his conscience. While he was in Alaska, he was reading up on everything he could about irrigation systems and backyard lighting, so when he came home, he came home running! For those of you in the East/Mid West, this may sound like extravagance since I grew up in Ohio and never heard of anyone having built in sprinklers and the like... However, here in the desert and even up in Utah (which is High desert) it is a must to have built in sprinklers, etc to sustain any kind of plant life in your yard! He took a week off of work for Phase 1 as well, but unfortunately the work required more than just one man, and more than just a week! However, this Phase was no match for him! With ambition to dig the foot deep trenches by hand, he quickly surrendered when he realized that the dirt was almost as hard as concrete and rented a machine to dig the trenches.

Once that was done, it was smooth sailing as he put in the matrix of PVC pipes, jointed and glued together as well as the lighting wires and drip tubing. By Friday he was putting in all the sprinkler heads and yesterday I helped with the individual drip lines to ensure each of our future plants is well nourished and hydrated! He even calculated which plants needed more water than others and we've accommodated accordingly! Yesterday we finished up, and John turned on the whole system for a test run before we filled in the trenches. Now our back yard looks no different than when he started the week, but it is now ready to get some greenery!!!! We will head out today and hopefully stop by some nurseries to compare prices and get the plants we want! We will have them planted by the nursery because most places will insure them when they plant them and you loose that piece of mind when you try to do it yourself. All we have to do, is pick out our plants and schedule for them to put them in... Maybe within the next week, we will have some beautiful green plants in our yard!!

The finished product (even though it doesn't look like much)- if you look close, the sprinklers are turned on!

Our future Citrus Tree- equipped with drip lines (with 8 gal/hr emitters) and lighting