Extreme Gardening

One of the major reasons that I decided to move from my apartment into a house was so that I could have a garden.  Now that I have moved, I have decided that I want a garden NOW.  Even though I will be leaving for Colombia in a week and a half, even though it's the middle of the summer, and even though I am currently living there by myself, I have decided that it is a good idea to go ahead and build four raised garden beds and a drip irrigation system.  I can be very impatient sometimes...

So, last week I started scheming.  I made some diagrams and headed out to Home Depot after work.  Basically, I figured that I could use some cheap lumber to make frames for the beds, and then fill them with soil, and then run a drip system from the hose outlet using a small sprinkler timer.  Pretty simple, right?

As it turned out, the only thing that went as planned was the construction of the frames for the raised beds.   It didn't take me too long on Saturday to screw the lumber into square frames, and put them in place.  Then, I decided to fill the beds with the 7 bags of soil that I had bought.  It was at this point that I realized that one bag of soil really doesn't do much - 0.75 cubic feet of soil is pretty insubstantial in a 4'x6' garden bed that is 6" deep.  Oh well, at least my frames looked nice...

The completed frames- two along the driveway, two in the space next to the garage.-

Next, I went back to Home Depot to get supplies for my drip system.  There, I discovered that there are two companies that make tubing and fittings for drippers.  The first company, Toro, you've probably heard of.  All their drip systems were based around a type of tubing called "Funny Pipe" (when I was trying to remember the name, all I could think of was "Crazy Hose"...), which has a series of specialized fittings that only fit their Funny Pipe Tubing, which costs $25 for 50 ft, or something like that.  I, being cheap as well as impatient, decided to go with the generic brand tubing and fittings - $9 for 100 ft of tubing, and only ~ $1-$3 for most of the fittings.  These fittings looked a bit sketchy in the store - normally, fittings for flexible tubing are basically barbed, tapered cones that fit inside the hose.  The fittings that I bought fit around the hose, rather than inside the hose, and they only had a single barb to keep the hose in (see diagram).  Working in lab, I've become a minor connoisseur of tubing and fittings, and these did not look good.  But, I figured, "why would they sell them if they don't work?"

Today, after hauling 15 40-lb bags of soil from Home Depot and filling the two furthest beds, I finished connecting up the drip system, and it worked!  Well, at least until I heard a popping noise, followed by the sound of gushing water.  As it turned out, those fittings were as bad as I had suspected - with any pressure in the line, they tend to pop out!  I ended up rushing all over the yard, trying to reconnect each fitting as it blew apart.  It looks like I've got some work to do to get this thing running...