Someone Call the Doctor! My Soil is Dead!!

Last year, we decided to take advantage of our drought and we built a peninsula where we plan to hold wedding ceremonies because our pond was dry and made it easy to get in there and move dirt around.  Last month, we got the area prepped for seed.  As it turns out, the only thing that could grow in the silt was weeds.  Let me tell you.  Those weeds could grow like crazy.  We’re talking three foot tall weeds.  However, we couldn’t get one single grass seed to germinate in our peninsula.  We had heard that the silt might be dead soil because there weren’t any microbes in it, so we weren’t expecting much.  The silt had been at the bottom of the pond for so many years that it had no oxygen or goodies in it to grow grass.  Picture us with sad faces.

After waiting for a month without one ounce of seed springing up, we threw in the towel.  It was time for a new plan.  We had always planned to irrigate the peninsula, but our original plans were do bring up some seed first and then irrigate, re-seed, and finish growing in the grass.  After our epic grass seed growing fail, we decided we would begin with irrigation this time around, follow it up with a round of compost, and then seed.

My dad, Tom, set to work on the Ditch Witch this time around for the project.  Sorry, I didn’t manage to get a picture of him on it.  He was kind of a ninja cat that day and appeared and disappeared before I even knew the work had been done.  The evidence of him was definitely left with several trenches dug.

Our boys headed over to Municipal Supply in Des Moines to purchase some 1 1/2 inch PVC piping. The trench pictured is on the east side of the peninsula.  The trench that was dug on the west end of the peninsula is for speaker wire and electricity.  Once the pipe was laid in the trenches, Jason had to hook it all up to our current irrigation system.  This required Jason and Austin digging a hole right near the edge of the practice green to attach to one of the practice green’s sprinkler heads.

In case you are wondering, why yes, that IS sweat dripping from Jason’s back at nine in the morning.  We like to save all the most fun jobs for the hottest days of the year.  

They measured everything off and determined they would need two half circle sprinkler heads to cover the area of the peninsula that needed water for our future grassy knoll.  Once they got that figured, they made two T’s where they would attach the sprinkler heads.

Here’s Ron playing around with all the fun PVC piping that we have to make the whole system attach to our current irrigation system.  After some playing around with fittings, he had it working.

That brought us to eleven in the morning when it was approximately 130 degrees outside, give or take a few.   Once it is over 90, it really all feels the same.  I forgot to mention the 99% humidity.  It also brought us to the end of this project for the day because Jason had run out of clean shirts.

Next up will be to lay in the conduit for our electric and speaker wire.  Who else is excited to get this project moving???  Anyone work in an office with air conditioning?  Suddenly working outside isn’t so glamorous, right?